New peer reviewed article on expert activism.
Judith Beyer has published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Dialectical Anthropology on "The common sense of expert activists: practitioners, scholars, and the problem of statelessness in Europe".
In her article, Judith Beyer argues against a theoretical reductionism that regards expertise and activism as two essentially different and mostly separate endeavors, and put forward the concept of the “expert activist.” Unpacking what she calls the “practitioner–scholar dilemma,” she shows that in their effort to end statelessness, “practitioners” take a reformist route that aims at realizing citizenship for the stateless, while “scholars” are open to a more revolutionary path that contemplates the denaturalization and even the eradication of the state. By drawing on Gramsci, she suggests that the impasse the group encounters in their work might relate more to the structural constraints imposed by the state within or against which they operate than to the problem of statelessness they are trying to solve. This article contributes to a body of emergent work in anthropology that explores the intersection of scholarly expertise and activism.
The article is open access.