Repairing Activist-Academic Relationships: Defining Methods to Improve Reciprocity and Movement Building in Degrowth

The degrowth movement, advocating for an eco-socialist restructuring of world economies, has failed to find a political foothold in American politics. This is despite growing support in Europe and positive, yet limited, reception in Canada. Previous literature diagnoses the American degrowth movement with confused and ineffective rhetoric, inhospitable intramovement politics, and too little scholarly support. In this article, I argue differently. I focus on the relationships between academics and activists within American degrowth, understanding academic-activist relationships to be historically extractive but also generative and didactic. Using semistructured interviews with academics and activists, and discourse analysis of the press coverage of degrowth, I define the state of academic-activist relationships as severely underdeveloped and uncooperative. Finally, I find that significant reforms to higher education’s opacity, exclusivity, and extractive productivity, and that encouraging activists to proactively center their narratives in the movement, may improve the lax reciprocity and slow movement building of American degrowth.