Activist turns: The (in)compatibility of scholarship and transformative activism

Is memory studies experiencing an activist turn? What discourses and practices surround such a pronouncement, and what forms of forgetting might such an assertion usher in? This commentary explores recent claim-making around memory studies’ activist turn and seeks to understand its provocations and critiques. It anchors these discourses within a wider constellation of scholar-activism, paying particular attention to citational politics and memory, activist forms of knowledge making, resource distribution, and the politics and precarities of the contemporary university system.