Due to its past and present complicity in colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, Eurocentric academia has a complicated relationship with oppressed populations around the world. Given this relationship as well as the ever-mounting crises of late capitalist modernity, how can critical and radical scholar-activists sensitively yet effectively engage these populations? How can they balance methodological rigor, conscientious self-reflection, and their political commitment to progressive social, environmental, and global transformation? How can they make their work both accessible and actionable for communities, organizations, and movements marginalized or altogether disregarded by the transnational academic-industrial complex? This course addresses these pressing questions by attempting to re-frame research as accompaniment. Drawing inspiration from the Oaxacan Indigenous concept of acompañamiento (“accompaniment”) and the Zapatista concept of preguntando caminamos (“Questioning, we walk”), it invites students to consider how intellectuals situated within the neo-colonial and neoliberal university can, through their research, forge concrete and mutually beneficial bonds of affinity and solidarity with frontline and fenceline actors fighting capitalism, state violence, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, ecological collapse, and other interlocking oppressions. This course asks students to contemplate how they can accompany their interlocutors at every stage of the research process, from project design to field or archival research to the interpretation and dissemination of results. Students will review a range of texts on scholar-activist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and other critical and radical approaches to research. Course materials will equip students with methodological frameworks that challenge the epistemological and axiological foundations of the typically depoliticized, extractivist research process as well as with particular methods that they can use in their own research projects. Students will have the opportunity to develop not only articles for scholarly publications but also editorials, policy proposals, creative interventions, and other research outputs that befit their personal, political, and intellectual goals.

Due to its past and present complicity in colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, Eurocentric academia has a complicated relationship with oppressed populations around the world. Given this relationship as well as the ever-mounting crises of late capitalist modernity, how can critical and radical scholar-activists sensitively yet effectively engage these populations? How can they balance methodological rigor, conscientious self-reflection, and their political commitment to progressive social, environmental, and global transformation? How can they make their work both accessible and actionable for communities, organizations, and movements marginalized or altogether disregarded by the transnational academic-industrial complex? This course addresses these pressing questions by attempting to re-frame research as accompaniment. Drawing inspiration from the Oaxacan Indigenous concept of acompañamiento (“accompaniment”) and the Zapatista concept of preguntando caminamos (“Questioning, we walk”), it invites students to consider how intellectuals situated within the neo-colonial and neoliberal university can, through their research, forge concrete and mutually beneficial bonds of affinity and solidarity with frontline and fenceline actors fighting capitalism, state violence, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, ecological collapse, and other interlocking oppressions. This course asks students to contemplate how they can accompany their interlocutors at every stage of the research process, from project design to field or archival research to the interpretation and dissemination of results. Students will review a range of texts on scholar-activist, decolonial, Indigenous, feminist, and other critical and radical approaches to research. Course materials will equip students with methodological frameworks that challenge the epistemological and axiological foundations of the typically depoliticized, extractivist research process as well as with particular methods that they can use in their own research projects. Students will have the opportunity to develop not only articles for scholarly publications but also editorials, policy proposals, creative interventions, and other research outputs that befit their personal, political, and intellectual goals.