From Conference to Community: Embedding Mutual Aid into Academic Criminology

Scholar activism seeks to bridge academia with the communities it studies, yet scholarship often operates at a distance from the conditions it examines, limiting opportunities for direct action. This study explores how mutual aid can be embedded within academic conference structures to support scholar activism. Using Unified Outreach as a case study, we draw on unstructured interviews with organizers and volunteers, supplemented by autoethnographic reflections. An abductive thematic analysis examines how participants experienced service integration within conference settings. Findings indicate that participants viewed mutual aid as forwarding the importance of their academic work, fostering relational connections, and addressing concerns about extractive research practices. At the same time, barriers emerged, including limited institutional support, time constraints, and uneven visibility within conference programming. This study demonstrates how conference-based service can function as a replicable model of scholar activism and offers actionable strategies for embedding community engagement into academic spaces in sustainable, structured ways.