This article investigates the relation between democracy and education in the context of radical student activism. Drawing upon participant observation and interviews with left-wing student activists in New Zealand in 2012 and 2015, it argues that a one-sided preoccupation with the student activists’ public actions as attempts to unleash disruptive forces of the political risks ignoring the undecidability and profoundly experimental and educative aspects of their activities. By paying attention to the less publicly visible social settings – or ‘free spaces’ – shaped by ideals of flat, horizontal democracy, the article shows how the students continuously mediate their radicality by negotiating and balancing a sense of ‘responsibility to act’ with a sense of ‘responsibility to otherness’. Democratic engagement thereby not only becomes a question of ‘disruptive’ political influence; it also comes to revolve around the continuous creation of spaces for collective self-education and experimentation with the conjuring of a common – yet plural – world.
In response to the ideals of cultural critique, complexity and moral relativism promoted in postmodern anthropology, different attempts have been made in recent decades to make anthropology more ‘engaged’ in the promotion of social change. In this article, we focus on three central contemporary positions on anthropological engagement: policy-oriented activist research, feminist-inspired collaborative research, and what we have chosen to call research for alterity and alternatives. Each of these approaches highlights certain ideas of participation and thereby conjure up particular kinds of communities to work with and through. We discuss the value and limitations of the three positions on engagement and argue that, in all its diversity, anthropological participatory research can play an important role in co-creating platforms for resistance and protest against various forms of domination and oppression while simultaneously contributing to preparing the ground for alternative imaginations, desires and ways of living.
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