Provocateur, Supporter, Mediator: An Emancipatory Epistemology of Roles

Abstract In an era of growing social inequality, the role of engaged researchers in furthering social justice deserves attention. From prior experience combined with ethnographic research on a municipalist process in Amsterdam's Northern borough, we derive an emancipatory epistemology of roles that engaged researchers can adopt during the research process; provocateur, supporter, and mediator. Provocateurs inform research participants of structural forces they might be unaware of, supporters assist with technical expertise, and mediators facilitate mutual understanding between different stakeholders. In research practice, researchers switch between roles and sometimes combine them. However, this complex reality is mostly overlooked in the literature. We argue that, in order to move the project of researchers promoting social justice forwards, especially in municipalist projects, such implicit and multi‐faceted practices need to be theorised and made explicit, while noting that tensions and moral conflicts can never completely be resolved.