Navigating Tensions and Contradictions : The Everyday Negotiation of Militant Research
Ruiz Cayuela, Sergio (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals)

Date:	2025
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. © 2025 The Author(s). Area published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).
Grants:	Agencia Estatal de Investigación JDC2023-050582-I Agencia Estatal de Investigación RYC2022-037059-I
Note:	Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-M
Note:	Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Engaged research ; Everyday ; Militant research ; Neoliberal university ; Positionality ; Tensions
Published in:	Area, 2025, art. e70067, ISSN 1475-4762

DOI: 10.1111/area.70067

7 p, 246.2 KB

The record appears in these collections:
Research literature > UAB research groups literature > Research Centres and Groups (research output) > Experimental sciences > Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA) > The Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability
Articles > Research articles
Articles > Published articles