On writing about collective action: struggles with categories, hope and the dialectics of sense-making

This intervention outlines some questions and thoughts about collective action, regarding how we write or think about it, and what we expect it to do, that I am struggling with at this conjuncture. It offers critical reflections on the very categories and terminology we use, and the risks of reifying ‘activist’ and ‘academic’ identities or roles. It challenges the expectation that social movements and community activism are or should be fountains of hope, highlighting how this might contribute to a misrecognition of hope’s own vulnerabilities and the other complex emotions that activism engenders. This intervention asserts the need for a dialectical engagement with collective action and with its political, ontological and epistemological significance. It also urges attentiveness to both the emancipatory and anti-emancipatory character of contemporary activism and of its intersections with academia. Finally, against the distorting influence of legacy media in categorising and attributing validity to particular versions of protest, community and political demands, it affirms the role that engaged research can play in building an alternative record of collective action and the (discursive) struggles in which it is enmeshed.