Once academic action trascends into activism,…

Once academic action trascends into activism, it ceases being academic output, due to intrinsic bias. The moment a researcher adopts a predetermined cause or political aim as a framework rather than as an object of scrutiny, the epistemic foundations of the work are compromised. Scholarship relies on critical distance, falsifiability and methodological rigour, while activism calls for commitment to a goal, sometimes even irrespective of immediate contrary evidence or lack of knowledge of all confounding factors (since these elements are rarely obtainable in real time, and activism calls for action in real time). The collusion of these domains does not enrich academic discourse, much on the contrary it disfigures it, collapsing analytic categories into ideological gestures. Activist scholarship represents a structural breach in the function of research as an activity grounded in provisionality, self-reflexivity, and systemic doubt. When the object of study is approached already imbued with sanctity, victimhood, judgement, etc, and the researcher prefigures the result in moral terms, analysis gives way to affirmation. But this moral categorization is what drives action in activism. If they coexist in the same activity, the production of knowledge is subordinated to its rhetorical and moral utility, which makes peer critique, nuance, and the pursuit of alternative hypotheses obsolete or politically suspect, to say the least. In this praxis academic legitimacy becomes contingent not on argumentation or empirical grounding, but on alignment with moral narratives.

— /u/brutalistgarden

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