The Activist Academic

The Activist Academic deftly explores the personal and connected process of doing work that most aligns with the values and identity of an activist academic. The authors accomplish this by inviting readers to witness their journey navigating the current limits for achieving tenure to move toward creating a space within academia or from the undercommons that feels most authentic to them and aligns with their purpose. The book offers readers exposure to relevant, critical pedagogies and theories, insight into practice, and a lens into the ways those who seek to impact social justice find spaces of liberation within and outside the restrictive system of higher education in America. (Read the full review in Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, Vol. 27, No. 3.)

Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, Vol. 27, No. 3, Excerpt of a review by Marisol Morales, Executive Director of the Carnegie Elective Classifications at the American Council on Education

"In The Activist Academic, Cann (Univ. of San Francisco) and DeMeulenaere (Clark Univ.) present a strong collaboration to chronicle their journey through academia from year one as newly hired academics to earning tenure in year seven. They seamlessly intertwine their stories and experiences as they offer readers an intimate glimpse into this seven-year progression, sharing their discussions of both theoretical and conceptual frameworks of their research as well as their understandings of best practices in teaching and learning. Through their candid narrative, the authors give readers an honest account of the highs and lows of pursuing an activist academic agenda, noting the questions and struggles that emerged through their research. They also share their vision of scholarship, teaching, and service as commitments to social justice while demonstrating for readers how they navigate some of the realities of managing life in academia. This book serves as a guide for other academics to engage in a dialogue about how they may transition from theory to practice in their own journeys as activists confronting racial and social injustices both within and outside academia."

A. L. Hsu, State University of New York College at Old Westbury, for CHOICE magazine - Feb. 2021, Vol 58, No. 6

"Cann and DeMeulenaere’s book is a crucial addition to the gradually amplifying conversation around doing critical work within an academic environment that has been successfully courted by neoliberal thought… they perform their loving, resistant, and emerging activist practice across every page." (Click HERE to read the full review.)

Teachers College Record review by Jake Burdick, Purdue University, TCR ID Number: 23595, Feb. 8, 2021

“The narrative style of the book is engaging and tends to soften the use of dry academic language that is intuitively opposed to the theories on which the book is based. It is well-positioned to speak to the emerging academic and may provide sustenance and clarity to the experience of doing activist work—in education or social work—that seem to be the stated goals of these professions. The Activist Academic contributes to a body of work that is practically applying theoretical concepts to a range of academic activities. I recommend the book for those activists who are struggling with the barriers to succeeding in a traditional academic trajectory when moved by passion and belief in social justice to continue activist work.” (Click HERE to read the full December 2020 review in Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work.)

Marion Riedel, Columbia School of Social Work, New York

“In deeply revolting times, Colette Cann and Eric DeMeulenaere have gifted us a book that is part GPS for navigating the academy; part glass of wine for surviving difficult politics; and part eavesdropping, as we listen in on their conversations, reflections, relations and even campfires. In the main narrative, The Activist Academic offers us a textual pajama party of laughter, relationship, teaching nightmares and radical innovations, activist research praxis and dilemmas. We appreciate through the pages the joys, struggles and wild imagination that grows at the intersection of activism and the academy. From the volume, we learn what it means to survive in the academy, with full heart and soul; in the footnotes, we meet the elders, ancestors and those who have written and journeyed before. As a critical small-book companion, the volume is a refreshing, radically honest and comforting text to accompany us as we carve radical possibilities, in the undercommons, with colleagues, students, activists, community members and movements for justice. The Activist Academic is oxygen for the researcher/scholar/teacher who dares to imagine the university as a site of radical accountability to justice.”

Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor of Critical Psychology and Urban Education, The Graduate Center, CUNY

"With all the humor, honesty, and humility that you'd expect in a conversation between friends, the dialogues between Cann and DeMeulenaere that span cover to cover animate the potential and the challenges of approaching research, teaching, and service as an Activist Academic. But be ready: drawing deeply on theory and experience, this book will pull readers into the conversations, the inquiry, and the unavoidable demand that we dive into the unresolvable contradictions at the heart of being a professor committed to justice."

Kevin Kumashiro, Ph.D., author of Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning toward Social Justice

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Margo Okazawa-Rey

Prologue

Chapter 1
Year One - Activists Entering the Academy

Chapter 2
Year Two - Capturing Praxis—Critical Co-Constructed Autoethnography

Chapter 3
Year Three - Framing Our Work in Critical Social Theory

Chapter 4
Year Four - Activist Research

Chapter 5
Year Five - Activist Pedagogy

Chapter 6
Year Six - Activist Service in Schools and the Community

Chapter 7
Year Seven - Community in the Undercommons

Afterword by John Saltmarsh

References

About the Authors

Index

Colette Cann

Colette N. Cann (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of San Francisco. Her scholarship has allowed her to collaborate with teachers, students and community organizations and has appeared in journals such as Race, Ethnicity and Education; Whiteness and Education; Urban Education; Journal of Peace Education; Qualitative Inquiry; and Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies.

Eric DeMeulenaere

Eric J. DeMeulenaere (Ph.D., U.C. Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Education at Clark University. He has consulted with urban school leaders and teachers nationally and internationally to transform their pedagogical practices and organizational school cultures. He is co-author of Reflections from the Field: How Coaching Made Us Better Teachers.

Interview with the authors on FreshEd