Navigating Tensions and Contradictions: The Everyday Negotiation of Militant Research

ABSTRACT This paper explores the tensions and contradictions generated when conducting militant research from within academia. More specifically, it focuses on how they play out and shape militant research on an everyday basis, and how they are constantly negotiated by militant researchers and mediated by their diverse positionalities. Drawing from my own experience of militant research in the British West Midlands, I discuss the three main tensions that I had to navigate and negotiate during my PhD. First, I examine the conflict between collective aspirations and professional motivations, and I call for the need to find a balance between them that allows the militant researcher to stay in academia whilst avoiding the extractivist dynamics of pseudo‐militancy. I argue for a strategy of alignment as a principle that can guide the daily process of militant research in trying to bring together collective and professional motivations. Second, I discuss how the unfitting positionality of militant researchers ends up creating a double impostor syndrome that makes us feel like both unworthy academics and activists. Whereas, a supportive institutional environment is crucial to cope with the academic side of it, commitment and reciprocity between the militant researcher and the community of struggle are key elements to negotiate the militant side. Third, I discuss the challenge of operating across diverse knowledges that are hierarchically organised and the need to constantly translate contexts and epistemic settings. I argue that both theoretical and practice‐oriented knowledges are important for militant research and that they can get together in feedback loops that spur socio‐ecological transformation. In conclusion, by recounting my lived experience, I conceptualise militant research as a complex, dynamic and contested practice composed of multiple intertwined tensions that are mediated by positionality. It is a process of constant negotiation on an everyday basis that can potentially push transformation forward.