Social Movement Studies

Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest

ISSN: 1474-2837 (Print) 1474-2829 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csms20

Towards an Insurrectionary Power/Knowledge:

Movement-Relevance, Anti-Oppression,
Prefiguration
Timothy Luchies
To cite this article: Timothy Luchies (2015) Towards an Insurrectionary Power/Knowledge:
Movement-Relevance, Anti-Oppression, Prefiguration, Social Movement Studies, 14:5, 523-538,
DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2014.998643
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2014.998643

Published online: 13 Jan 2015.

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Social Movement Studies, 2015

Vol. 14, No. 5, 523538, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2014.998643

Towards an Insurrectionary Power/

Knowledge: Movement-Relevance,
Anti-Oppression, Preguration
TIMOTHY LUCHIES
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Department of Political Studies, Queens University, Kingston, Canada

ABSTRACT Despite ongoing efforts to articulate radical methods and theoretical frameworks for
social movement research, the eld remains embedded in exploitative, oppressive, and hierarchical
modes of knowledge production. Following Foucault, I argue that this is because societies like ours,
founded through racial and patriarchal violence, are invested in a regime of truth supportive of that
violence. In light of this, I argue that social movements scholars need to adopt a radically different
form of knowledge practice. Building on anarchist, anti-racist feminist, and anti-colonial
scholarship, this paper begins by analysing how liberalism constrains social justice organizing and
how academic norms foreclose accountable social movements scholarship. I then introduce three
unique ethics emerging in resistance to this situation: movement-relevant, anti-oppressive, and
pregurative. The rst confronts the extractive imperatives of enlightenment truth-making; the
second resists its neutral and disinterested tendencies; and the third models a rejection of its
hierarchical and exclusive mode of authority. I argue that together they provide scholars with a
strategy for re-/orienting their research towards what Foucault theorizes as an insurrection of
knowledges. These three ethical frameworks combine to facilitate an insurrectionary power/
knowledge that fosters collective struggle as it progressively dismantles the regime of truth
underlying social movements research.
KEY WORDS : Research ethics, power/knowledge, social movements, preguration, anti-oppression,
movement-relevance, activism

What does it mean to build radical, intersectional, and transformative research practices
against the exploitative and extractive traditions of academe? What responsibility do we
have as scholars to search out the violence that secures our particular power and privilege,
and to name and dismantle this violence through our research? How might we meet these
questions preguratively producing alternative futures in the shell of the old and
build liberation through our research questions and methods?
These questions call for commitments to actively engage with grassroots struggles
against oppression and exploitation, and to do research that feeds these struggles. They
bring together the constructive bent of anarchist politics and the analytical leverage of
anti-racist and feminist critique. Many of the problems confronted by such questions are
familiar to those of us invested in and researching with social justice movements.1 Yet,
Correspondence Address: Timothy Luchies, Department of Political Studies, Queens University, Kingston,
K7L3N6, Canada. Email: timothy.luchies@queensu.ca
q 2015 Taylor & Francis

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despite varied attempts to develop new methods and theories for social movement
research, a number of problems persist. In the following pages I show how the questions
above allow us to address social movement studies complicity with exploitative,
oppressive, and hierarchical modes of knowledge production. Central to this endeavour is
an intersectional critique of power/knowledge or the ways in which knowledge is
produced by and productive of power (Strega, 2005, p. 226; see also Foucault, 1977).
The concept of power/knowledge provides the necessary leverage to expose historical
contingency and instability in purported scientic and social truths, to intervene into their
contested and political operation. Foucaults (1972) theorization of the regime of truth
underlying scientic and state discourses of authority, legitimation, application, and
function (pp. 50 52; see also Foucault, 1977, p. 131) provides a framework through
which to analyse the power relations that construct social movement scholarship. When
this framework is combined with an intersectional analysis of power and applied to the
forms of knowledge produced by the state and academy, it reveals a web of institutions
premised on violence and exclusion (Razack, 2008; see also Smith, 2005; Smith, 2006).
Responding to this critique in social movement research practice requires us to situate
ourselves within and work to dismantle the violence enveloping us: imperialism,
heterosexism, ableism, capitalism, and cis-/male and white supremacy.2 Our strategies and
tactics, and often our modes of critique, are heavily conditioned by these systems of
domination. If social movement research is to feed into concrete struggles for collective
liberation, it needs to engage in a knowledge practice that works alongside the people and
politics of these struggles, and actively takes part in naming and dismantling oppression
and exploitation.
Doing such work through academic research however embedded or self-critical is
fraught. At a basic level, social movement research relies on the unfunded and precarious
work of activists and organizers to produce scholarly knowledge and careers. There is no
set method for avoiding the exploitative, oppressive, and hierarchical functions of
academic research examined below. Nonetheless, struggling against this power/
knowledge requires a commitment to research programmes accountable to movements
and communities in struggle. This article is thus a response to method-building around
social movement research in this journal (Bevington & Dixon, 2005; Gillan & Pickerill,
2012a) and elsewhere (see Choudry & Kapoor, 2010; Croteau, Hoynes, & Ryan, 2005).
I offer these pages as a product of my attempts to further this project, and as a reection of
ongoing dialogue with fellow radical scholars and with movements I am connected to.
I begin by situating the eld in relation to power/knowledge via institutions and discourses
impacting social movements inside and outside of the academy. I then focus in on recent
conceptualizations of movement-relevant and anti-oppressive research as complementary
correctives to exploitative and oppressive norms of social science. Drawing from these
emergent bodies of work and from contemporary pregurative knowledge practices on the
left, I articulate a power/knowledge for collective liberation. Against the exploitative
tendencies in social movement research I employ an ethics of relevance; against its
oppressive tendencies, an ethics of anti-oppression; and against its hierarchical tendencies,
an ethics of preguration. I argue that they compose a strategy towards an insurrection of
knowledges that are opposed primarily not to the contents, methods, or concepts of a
science, but to the effects of the centralizing powers which are linked to the institution and
functioning of an organized scientic discourse (Foucault, 1977, p. 84). Together, these
ethics form an insurrectionary power/knowledge that facilitates the growth of knowledges

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that feed and foster collective liberation as it disrupts and progressively dismantles the
regime of truth underlying social movement research.

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Social Movements, Civil Society, and the State

A growing number of activists are turning their attention towards the power relations latent
in their organizing work. Citing a range of social movement histories, they argue that
understanding oppression as both personal and political is pivotal to transforming society.
To this end, writers, trainers, and organizers draw from anti-colonial, anti-racist, and
feminist thought to organize their communities against multiple and intersecting systems
of oppression (Luchies, 2014). This produces a distinctive form of power/knowledge that
subverts authoritarian and bureaucratized discourse while building collective liberation.
As I will discuss later in the paper, they ascribe to a power-with (Gordon, 2008, p. 48;
McLaren, 2002, p. 41) approach to knowledge that aspires towards feminist, radical
disability, and anarchist forms of collective empowerment. Through progressive
networking of movements and politics, activists are developing and integrating reexive
practices into their organizational structures, internal cultures, and resistance strategies.
This process is visible in projects that bring anti-oppression politics and a power-with form
of knowledge production into anti-authoritarian networks: in archives like anarchalibrary,
books like The Revolution Starts at Home, journals like 4strugglemag, and zines and blogs
like Accounting for Ourselves and UnsettlingAmerica. The signicance of this trend is
largely unrecognized outside of the radical left. Dominant neo-/liberal notions of
resistance and social justice obscure both activists radical critiques of domination and
their diverse efforts to challenge it. The permeation of this into scholarly discourses on
social movements needs be questioned and our knowledge production attuned to
movements own complex understandings of their work. An intersectional analysis of
power/knowledge provides a crucial point of entry into such work.
Mainstream media, state, and legal systems strategically criminalize the use of militant
tactics by activists, and strategically interpret less confrontational tactics through liberal
political imaginaries. As has been evident in coverage of recent De/Occupy and Idle No
More actions, even when movements are received positively, their anti-hierarchical, anticapitalist, anti-racist, feminist, and decolonizing analyses remain all but invisible. This
occurs through the discursive separation of activists pursuit of justice through legitimate
legal and political channels from their sharp critiques of settler colonialism, white and cis-/
male supremacy, ableism, hetero-sexism, and capitalism. The state, the academy, NGOs,
and the media, all participate in this wilful ignorance and contribute to the criminalization
or erasure of such radical critique from otherwise sanctioned political activism (Choudry,
2010, pp. 19 20; see also INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, 2007). As a result,
histories of institutional reform in which freedoms are bequeathed from above overwrite
activists successes in tear[ing] freedoms, resources and rights from the hands of elites
(Blaug, 1999, p. 44). The separation of radical analysis from activism within established
arenas of politics is not only articial but also serves to bolster a liberal ideological
consensus. It strips the hard-won victories of anti-racists, feminists, anarchists, and others
of their radical edge, and submerges resistance in liberal narratives of self-interest,
progress, and trickle-down. Such constructions of social movement action in public and
academic discourse normalize the very power relations and institutions under contestation.
As a result, radical movements are reduced to competing claims-makers, categorized in

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line with the segmentation of state and social policy areas. This puts movement
organizations into tension with each other in their desire for funding, recognition, and
voice (Smith, 2007, p. 10) and sties the potential for collective organizing and analysis.
Likewise, national mythologies justify or erase North American settler states violent
history alongside multiple systems of exploitation and oppression (Razack, 2002, pp. 1 4;
Spade, 2011, p. 24). They construct a neutral state as the primary and legitimate mode of
politics, and are foundational to liberal academic, media, and policy frameworks. In turn,
these frameworks sanction social movement organizing only insofar as activists methods
and messaging conform to liberal notions of an NGO-dominated civil society
codependent with its settler state and criminal justice system (Choudry, 2010, pp. 23, 27;
INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, 2007). If activists conformity to this is in
doubt, national mythologies become a tool for discrediting or dismissing their political
work. Politicians and legal authorities also draw on national mythologies to construct
dissidents and activists as alien, subversive, dirty, or sick and thus a threat to liberal
democracy (Campbell, 1998, p. 3; see also Neocleous, 2008; Wver, 1995). This
discursive move constructs social justice organizing as a threat by connecting the idea of
social or national order with the oppressive and exploitative status quo. It justies
repression through modern protest policing, surveillance operations, and increasingly
punitive legal frameworks. Thus, just as liberal narratives of progress erase radical
critiques from legitimate forms of dissent, liberal discourses of threat criminalize activism
that is militant or illegitimate. These twin strategies have a powerful dampening effect on
social movement struggle: they cleanse public discourse of radical ideas and cleanse social
movements of militant organizers.
This is how liberalism engages movement knowledges: erasure, misinterpretation, and
criminalization of dissent by the most powerful apparatuses of public politics and
discourse. However, the imperialist, hetero-sexist, capitalist, ableist, white and cis-/male
supremacist ideologies embedded in North American society also permeate the left,
rendering activists organizing and community-building work even more precarious and
politicized. The effectiveness of grass roots organizing to resist intersectional violence and
build liberatory alternatives is vital to overthrowing dominant frames of political
legitimacy and political imagination that keeps us on our knees (Blaug, 1999, p. 52). The
imperilled state of such horizontal and anti-oppressive organizing requires social
movement scholars to take the paradox of their existence seriously in relationship to this
politics (Dunne, Karamali, & Shukaitis, 2004, p. 563). For our research to feed into these
struggles, the often exploitative, oppressive, and hierarchical power/knowledge
underlying social science needs to be addressed directly.
Social Movement Research and the Academy
Academic research has long been a means through which different systems and relations
of power ableism, colonialism, imperialism, hetero-sexism, white and cis-/male
supremacy, capitalism have been discursively produced and reinforced. Smith (2006)
suggests that such coding of hierarchy and power happens through the formal rules of
individual scholarly disciplines and scientic paradigms, and the institutions that support
them (including the state) (pp. 7 8; see also Mohanty, 2003, p. 41). Reecting on social
movement studies, Cox and Nilsen (2007) add that the disciplinary and subdisciplinary
boxes of academia represent a reication and, ultimately, a taking for granted of a

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particular social order that mirrors global systems of oppression and exploitation (p. 426).
Academic attempts at critique are managed and ltered by variously institutionalized
rules of practice (Smith, 2006, pp. 43 44) and relations of ruling (Mohanty, 2003,
p. 56). These different techniques of control curtail how we approach academia, and
produce disciplined and docile scholarship that is complicit in existing systems of power
and privilege (McRuer, 2004, pp. 50 57). They ensure that even as we push back here or
there against the effects of social scientic power/knowledge, we do so as good and
faithful contributors to academic and colonial modes of knowledge production. If we push
too far, we are quickly reminded that our compliance is the condition for job security and
advancement not least through departmental review, publication requirements, and
funding restrictions (Croteau, 2005, pp. 25 32). Such controls also insulate us from each
other. In social movement studies, sustained contact with settler colonial studies, critical
race theory, gender studies, or radical disability studies remains uncommon despite their
importance to contemporary organizing (see Correa, 2011; Zemlinskaya, 2010). These
elds may not be solely oriented towards the study of social movements, but they have
developed unique and useful power/knowledge grown directly from grass roots and social
justice struggles (see Brown & Strega, 2005a).
Regulation by discipline is accentuated by the dominance of Enlightenment
epistemologies in social movement research. Foucault argues that by their imperatives
we are forced to produce the truth of power that our society demands [ . . . ]. Power never
ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it institutionalizes,
professionalizes and rewards its pursuit (1977, p. 93). Societies like ours, founded
through racial and patriarchal violence, are invested in a regime of truth supportive of that
violence. Enlightenment theories of knowledge, including objectivity and neutrality, are
based in the social, historical, and cultural experiences of White men (Brown & Strega,
2005b, p. 10). This shields academic power/knowledge from questions central both to
social movement struggle and scholarship, questions of power, politics and survival
posed by its Others (Brown & Strega, 2005b, p. 6). This carries over into dominant
frameworks of ethics oversight, which function by way of Western metrics of truth and
validity, and delegitimize alternative modes of knowledge production. Social movement
research programmes and methods are also conditioned by these institutional
surroundings, and foreclosed by the conceptual and ethical frameworks maintained by
the hetero-patriarchal, ableist, cis and white supremacist, colonial academy. To the extent
that social movement research fails to counter this regime of truth, it reinforces cis and
white supremacist, ableist, and hetero-patriarchal ideologies. There is no methodological
shortcut to dismantling the larger economic and ideological praxis of disinterested
scientic inquiry and pluralism that are the surface manifestations of a latent economic
and cultural colonization of the non-Western world (Mohanty, 2003, p. 42).
In social movement studies proper, this power/knowledge is inected by multiple
disciplines, geographies, and theoretical frameworks. Its dominant form in North America
is deeply invested in the production of social scientic truths about activism. As the highly
inuential McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (1997) argue, the purpose of social movement
research is to identify recurrent large-scale structures and sequences and recurrent
smaller-scale causal mechanisms so as to build general and comparative knowledge
around movement politics (p. 160; see also McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001). This
framework represents only the most popular mode of research in social movement studies,
but a key problematic here saturates the eld. This problematic is not one of theoretical

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accuracy or methodological coherence, but of producing knowledge in a way that

reproduces a hierarchy of knowledge while it claims social scientic legitimacy (Foucault,
1977, p. 85). Even though an increasing number of movement scholars have some
awareness of the critiques raised above, their scholarship can still fail to address the
complexity of the power/knowledge that divides academics and activists in terms of the
tasks they undertake and the goals they pursue, their audiences and their relationships with
them, their accreditation, and perhaps most important the forms of knowledge they
produce (Barker & Cox, 2002, p. 1; see also Juris, 2007, pp. 172 173).When movement
knowledge or engagement is brought into academic scholarship, it is still primarily
corroborative rather than constitutive of method and analysis. This parasitic relationship to
movement knowledge mines it for new and exciting concepts, theories, and critiques.
It treats communities in struggle as objects of study to be observed, described and
explained; not as active processes that people engage with, experience and transform
(Barker & Cox, 2002, p. 3; see also Chesters, 2012, p. 145). The researchers task here is
not to work alongside movements through their respective knowledges and struggles.
Rather, their task is the extractive production or renement of knowledge for the academy.
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tillys guidance is representative of a tendency that cuts across
social movements studies to view the neutral production of truths about social
movements as a desirable political project in itself. Scholars regularly suggest the
importance of their research for furthering a benign knowledge-in-general (Gillan &
Pickerill, 2012b, p. 138). They are expected to contribute to this knowledge and make
authoritative pronouncements about movements composition, culture, organizing
structure, strategies, and its success or failure. The power/knowledge operative here
assumes the primacy of the academy; something is known when it has been admitted into
scholarly discourse. It disciplines researchers towards what Barker and Cox (2002, p. 3)
term political abstentionism and the appropriation of movement knowledge within preexisting modes of discourse (Cox & Nilsen, 2007, p. 426). Social movement scholarship
is thus conditioned by and productive of power/knowledge, where the problems are
authority, legitimacy, and access (Foucault, 1972, pp. 50 52). They lie on a different level
than methodological and theoretical rigour, and they require a different approach. It is
important to critique the elds irrelevance to social justice activists and its failure to
address dominant constructions of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality. But if such
critiques are concerned only with explanatory power or producing more accurate
knowledge, they remain tied to a regime of truth that privileges institutionalized and
professionalized knowledge to the detriment of others.
These critiques of social science have already had some impact in social movement
studies. Scholars are nding diverse and novel ways to contribute meaningfully to
movement praxis. Srivastava (2006, p. 60) uses poststructural theory to interrogate lets
talk approaches to anti-racism in feminist organizing. In so doing, she cuts through
complex forms of white supremacy in academic and movement power/knowledges.
Focusing more on the research process itself, Eichhorn (2001, p. 572) stretches the limits
of ethnography to consider the need for accountability within zine networks, and so opens
up important avenues for engaging textually with communities of resistance. Graeber
(2004) theorizes a mode of academic activist alliance where scholars problematize and
transform how they share their research and ndings with movement collaborators: not as
prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities as gifts (p. 12). Gordons (2008, pp. 7
8) work to provide tools for activists ongoing reections models gifting through

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interventions into movement theory and practice. Juris (2007) militant ethnography
proceeds similarly, fusing collaborative knowledge production with activist practice to
facilitate ongoing activist (self-)reection regarding movement goals, tactics, strategies,
and organizational forms (p. 165). Each of these authors is engaging productively with
challenges raised above, and provides powerful examples of engaged scholarship. Yet, as
we adapt such methods to our own research, we need to remember that power/knowledge
adapts as well. Like epistemological and methodological alternatives developed in other
contexts (including standpoint, intersectionality, or genealogy), our use of emerging
methods in social movement studies requires careful strategic framing to realize their full
potential.
In following sections, I articulate such a strategy by weaving together three powerful
responses to the regime of truth problematized here. Movement-relevant, anti-oppressive,
and pregurative principles provide a way to move from building alternative methods or
theories of social movements to building an alternative power/knowledge alongside
struggles for social justice.
Towards an Ethics of Relevance
One way to build an alternative research practice is to prioritize the relevance and utility of
our scholarship for activists rather than scientic truth-making. This requires a redirection
of energy from a power/knowledge that takes academia as its primary audience.
Scholarship documenting and theorizing contemporary anti-authoritarian politics, for
example, promises useful insights for social justice activists (see Maeckelbergh, 2011;
McDonald 2002; Yates, 2015). But even here, scholars are constrained by their felt
responsibility to rene and systematize sociological truths about social movements and by
the inaccessibility of academic writing. These constraints are not unique to this eld; they
are part of a power/knowledge that requires and rewards certain forms of knowledge and
not others. The most transformative implications of such research are obscured not by
some fault of the researchers, but because they are irrelevant and threatening to a social
scientic regime of truth. We need to participate, theorize, and transform alongside the
communities we work with, but transforming this regime of truth requires something else.
It requires, as Ziadeh and Hanieh (2010) argue, that knowledge-in-struggle be prioritized
as a central and long-term intellectual project (pp. 92 93). Our research needs to plug into
ongoing cooperative processes of movement knowledge building that adopt political
projects and trajectories from and with those directly affected. An ethics of relevance
emphasizes academics responsibility to nd these places in which to meaningfully
contribute to movement-building. This implies mutual struggle and respect, including
mutual struggle to overturn the imperatives of power/knowledge that are hostile to such
relationships. [I]t is not enough simply to identify with a movement or study a
movement; an ethics of relevance requires dynamic engagement with movements in the
formulation, production, renement, and application of [our] research (Bevington &
Dixon, 2005, p. 190). This collaborative and movement-oriented research process does not
sit well with established frameworks for degree completion, publishing, or research ethics.
Nonetheless, grappling with the nuances of movement knowledge in such a way can be
benecial for both academic and grass roots struggles for social justice. Researchers can
help to offset potential weaknesses of activist knowledges like limited access to
information, the reproduction of accepted wisdom, and the limitations of volunteered time

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and resources. As educators and knowledge-workers, they can also learn from movements
diverse tactics and strategies to transform the academy from within.
Bevington and Dixon suggest some rst moves towards such engaged and movementrelevant research, beginning with locating the issues and questions of most importance to
movement participants (2005, p. 198). This means getting familiar with activists ongoing
work and the dynamics of collaborative knowledge production. Taking the time to develop
an understanding of the political struggles within and around the movements we engage
with is crucial to cultivating relevance in our research. It may not result in publications or
promotions, but it provides the groundwork for mutual struggle against a dehumanizing
regime of truth. Building sustained connections with activists and movements involves a
research ethics that responds to on-the-ground struggles and feeds into communities
incremental, long-term political education and organizing work (Choudry, 2010, p. 30;
see also Ziadeh & Hanieh, 2010, pp. 95 96). This means investing in struggles for social
justice rather than or in addition to academic fora. It means a research programme
starting from afnity the sharing of common ground for struggle, and solidarity and
support for those who resist (Lewis, 2012, p. 229). An ethics of relevance shifts the focus
of social movement research towards supporting and sustaining struggles for collective
liberation, and it challenges the norm of exploitative scholarship in the process. Instead of
debating theory or method within the connes of an extractive power/knowledge, an ethics
of relevance opens up a path to re-envision our scholarship as a potentially creative and
empowering insurrection against it.
Towards an Ethics of Anti-Oppression
Decisions about where, how, and why to do such collaborative research are always political
ones. It is well established that knowledge however produced and authorized is always
partial and interested and thoroughly saturated with power relations (Strega, 2005, p. 213).
Alongside questions of relevance, confronting the politics of knowledge embedded in social
movement research necessitates an intersectional politics that confronts its oppressive
functions. An ethics of anti-oppression provides a set of questions to bring this politics into
our research design: Who owns it? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benet from it?
Who has designed its questions and framed its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write
it up? How will its results be disseminated? (Smith, 2006, p. 10; see also Potts & Brown,
2005, pp. 264 273). Rather than establish a set method, these probing questions
encourage academics to engage in contextual and contingent negotiations towards
reciprocal research relationships with the people they are working with. In a somewhat
different vein than that of movement-relevance, these questions are used to broach critiques
of ableism, capitalism, imperialism, hetero-sexism, and white and cis-/male supremacy in
the academy. They draw attention to how these forms of power adhere to the mechanics of
research design. For each of these systems of power, [k]nowledge can be oppressive in how
it is constructed and utilized and/or it can be a means of resistance (Potts & Brown, 2005,
p. 261). An ethics of anti-oppression foregrounds a commitment both to the activists
involved in contesting relations of oppression and a commitment to furthering intersectional
resistance. It pursues a reexive, responsive, and accountable power/knowledge via
reexive self-positioning and reciprocity.
An anti-oppressive critique of power/knowledge implies a careful deconstruction of
the researchers location and political commitments, which are obscured by

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methodological claims to objectivity, neutrality, and gender and race-blindness towards

producing research that empowers resistance (Brown & Strega, 2005b, p. 10). That is to
say, it encourages researchers to think concretely about how our academic work might
undercut or reinforce ongoing struggles for self-determination and empowerment.
Bringing an ethics of anti-oppression into our scholarship requires a process of selfeducation in the systems of violence that secure and maintain the status quo, and
integrating it into our scholarship, recognizing our own privilege and working to
dismantle the unjust systems that keep us in that privileged space (Potts & Brown, 2005,
p. 258). Doing this as part of our research practice involves countering and contesting the
oppression and exploitation that among other things upholds and authorizes our
power/knowledge as academics and researchers. [R]eexive efforts to express and
interrogate [our] positionality are an important part of this process (Hesse-Biber &
Leckenby, 2004, p. 220), but require something other than self-centred biographies or
disclaimers that often distance or distract researchers from participating in struggles for
social justice (Ahmed, 2004; Smith, 2013). Rather, reexive interrogations of
positionality are a technique to prepare us for engaging with modes of power/knowledge
incommensurable with that of social science. Developing a situated and intersectional
understanding of power allows researchers to better assess how to produce resources and
critiques that feed resistance struggles and destabilize oppressive institutions. As such, an
ethics of anti-oppression includes negotiating reciprocity with activist collaborators in
appropriate ways, and ensuring that the knowledge produced in the research process is
accessible and meaningful to the people who helped make it: not simply to share surface
information (pamphlet knowledge) but to share the theories and analyses which inform the
way knowledge and information are constructed and represented [ . . . ] to demystify, to
decolonize (Smith, 2006, pp. 15 16). As Mohanty (2003) argues in her response to white
supremacist and colonial discourses within feminist scholarship, the work of
deconstructing and dismantling and of building and constructing need to take equal
priority (p. 17). An ethics of anti-oppression infuses these two tasks within social
movement scholarship by rejecting the notion of disinterested knowledge and encouraging
a reexive and critical engagement with intersectional struggles for social justice.
By shaping social movement research to support ongoing movement work through a
commitment to fostering anti-oppressive politics, we refuse another problematic aspect of
social scientic power/knowledge and move that much closer to knowledge that serves the
interests of social justice.
Towards an Ethics of Preguration
Movement-relevant and anti-oppressive frameworks hold important insights for social
movement research. I suggest preguration as a nal ethical mode because it can help to
focus and accentuate the transformative power of the other two, and because it is a theory
grounded in movements I am engaged with. Preguration has a long and varied history as
a theory of social change (Yates, 2015, pp. 2 4). For the groups I work with, it is infused
with a distinctly anarchistic politics and implies a refusal to privilege ends over means, and
a commitment to building a new world in the shell of the old (see Day, 2005; Gordon,
2008; Maeckelbergh, 2011). In anarchist traditions, it is often treated as a kind of ethics,
inseparable from the practice of direct action. An ethics of preguration emphasizes not
just overturning dominant and dominating political, economic, and social relationships,

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but developing concrete alternatives to them in this very process. Preguration sets a path
to social transformation through activists painstaking and forever incomplete work to
cultivate and proliferate collective liberation through radical spaces and relationships. It is
an ethics embedded in the tactics and strategies of many contemporary social movements.
The shift towards a pregurative ethics does not mean that anarchistic movements are not
concerned with state or capitalist oppression, but that they are also invested in
intersectional strategies that go deeper than restructuring political or economic
institutions (Luchies, 2014, p. 112). Preguration here is not so much a strictly dened
tactic or theory as it is a guiding principle for rening and intensifying the liberatory
potential of movement praxis. For this reason and not just its anarchistic bent in certain
forms of activism it is resistant to conceptual and empirical standardization.
Preguration as an ethics works by way of its indeterminacy. Composing or adopting a
singular framework by which to measure and assess whether and to what degree a politics
is pregurative (see Yates, 2015, p. 18) can therefore be as dangerous as it is insightful.
Regardless of whether such a framework is articulated by activists or researchers, it
reduces the pedagogical exibility of the concept and can frustrate tentative expansions of
its ethics, like articulations of intersectional pregurative politics (Luchies, 2014; see
Generation FIVE, 2007; INCITE! Women of Color against Violence, 2005; LA COiL,
n.d.). The promise of preguration for social movement research comes from the
same adaptability that is so useful for social justice organizing. With the spread of
pregurative ethics across the left, a broad shift away from hierarchical and bureaucratic
models in the form and function of social movement organizing has occurred.
Over the past few decades, this has included activists incorporating intersectional analyses
of power in anti-authoritarian strategies for change (Day, 2005; Gordon, 2008; Khan,
Kaur, Desil, & Kinsman, 2006; Luchies, 2014). Instead of working from a singular
problematic or struggle, activists are applying these principles together to build networks
of resistance that respond contextually to multiple and mutually supporting systems of
oppression and exploitation. Making the development of exible, multidimensional
analyses of power fundamental to this pursuit, they also engage in regular problem-solving
of how activists and coalitions fail to fully realize a pregurative and intersectional politics
(see Crass, 2013; Jones, n.d.; OBrien, n.d.). In addition to such specialized knowledge
work, a pregurative ethics is embedded in anti-authoritarians general politics of
knowledge.
Alongside well-documented tasks of mobilization or claims-making activists are
engaged in rich and non-centralized forms of knowledge production, extending and
combining fragmented knowledge to gain not a complete picture, but rather a better
understanding of the social mechanisms at work, so as to direct their efforts (Wainwright,
1994, p. 108). Chesters (2012) adds that this process involves the production of
alternative political imaginaries a politics of possibilities and theories of knowledge
about how to actualize these imagined possibilities (pp. 146 147). In practice, the
techniques and politics of such knowledge of critical consciousness and alternative
imaginaries are intimately interconnected. As Barker and Cox (2002) observe, in these
activists everyday organizing they draw on general ideas of best practice, historical
precedents, organizational principles, the relationship between ends and means etc. to
negotiate tensions in their political commitments and the concrete demands of their work
(p. 12). These reexive negotiations do not pretend at objective or disinterested knowledge
production and are explicitly grounded in movement work and directly accountable to

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struggles for social justice. They occur as part of a uid (McDonald, 2002, p. 115) mode
of activism, and represent anti-hierarchical relationships and infrastructures that extend
beyond any single project. Seeing their politics as antithetical to traditional power/
knowledge, activists have produced a unique and pregurative authorizing apparatus, or
system of investing discourse with power and legitimacy (Eichhorn, 2010, pp. 640 641).
Through this apparatus, activists are subverting and building alternatives to top-down and
bureaucratized power/knowledge in ways Foucault (1977) might have called a
reactivation of local knowledges (p. 85).
One of the forms such local knowledges take shape is through zine (small, selfpublished pamphlet) production, a fairly representative media in activist and antiauthoritarian knowledge networks. Duncombes (2008) seminal analysis of this genre
ags a latent politics of do-it-yourself and cooperative production processes, the
proliferation of informal networking, and the construction of alternative communities
against dominant culture (2008; see also Bell, 2001; Eichhorn, 2010; Ferguson, 2011,
pp. 67 128; Jeppesen, 2011). Duncombes (2008) observation of the subcultures politics
by example leads him to propose that it holds a unique promise of radicalization (p. 199).
This promise is manifest in a wide range of activist knowledges, many of which function
through anarchistic networks of cooperative and pregurative practice. Unlike much of the
knowledge produced in academia or other modern bureaucracies, the knowledge
developed in the course of movement-building is highly contextual, highly collaborative,
and highly applied. Activists varied production of lm, theatre, reports, workshops, and
other media places the power of truth-making in the hands of affected individuals and
communities, thereby unsettling hierarchical notions of expertise and authority.
Knowledge is often collected and developed communally, and regularly shared and
reviewed either face-to-face with the authors or in small communities of activists. Even
activists less immediate or intimate means of knowledge sharing such as web portals or
archives are regularly sites of collective review and discussion. Reecting on antiauthoritarian contributions to these networks, Jeppesen (2010) argues they are produced
by anarchist communities engaged in much more than media production, as part of this
culture, anarchist zines produce practices of equality beyond the zine, in effect
contributing to the groundwork for long term social sustainability (p. 2). This is
preguration in practice: the power-with by which knowledge is produced and shared is
pivotal to its reception and legitimation (see Eichhorn, 2001; Jeppesen, 2010). This also
represents an autonomous, non-centralized kind of theoretical production (Foucault,
1977, p. 81) realized and rened through collective processes of writing, sharing,
archiving, distributing, reading, and workshopping. Knowledge produced in this way,
even if widely accepted in different communities, is notable in that it is never sanctioned
as true or complete. It is embedded in a perpetual process of problem-solving power and
hierarchy (Day, 2005; Jeppesen, 2010; Luchies, 2014). Knowledge is subject to critique,
but through an intersectional and pregurative ethic sensitive to context and to the quiet
operation of ableism, hetero-sexism, white and cis-/male supremacy, and capitalism in
knowledge work. In some ways this anarchistic politics is not a fully consistent or fully
constituted system of power/knowledge. It is also by no means autonomous of power and
oppression. Yet, it is the very openness and indeterminacy of this knowledge practice that
is facilitating a harmonization of intersectional and pregurative politics in antiauthoritarian networks. It is also this openness that makes it integral to an insurrectionary
power/knowledge.

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Conclusion: Towards an Insurrectionary Power/Knowledge

This article has reected on the ways social movement research is embedded within
oppressive systems of power/knowledge, and has stressed the importance of rethinking the
misguided pursuit of academic objectivity and neutrality. I propose here that we prioritize
concrete contributions to struggles for social justice possible through movementrelevance, grounding our scholarship within the critical-relational framework of antioppression, and transforming our research process into a collective project of power-with/
knowledge. Together, they equip us to reorient social movement research towards an
insurrectionary power/knowledge and towards collective liberation.
Movement-relevance, anti-oppression, and preguration overlap and agree in many
ways. Combined, they form a strategy to unleash an insurrection of knowledges against
the institutions and against effects of the knowledge and power that invests scientic
discourse (Foucault, 1977, p. 87). An ethics of relevance proposes a reorientation of
knowledge production from the extractive imperatives of enlightenment truth-making to
supporting and feeding struggles for collective liberation. It implies a commitment to
serving the needs of social justice movements. Anti-oppressive ethics call for the
dismantling of knowledge practices that reproduce capitalist, ableist, imperialist, heterosexist, and white and cis-/male supremacist oppressions. It emphasizes a commitment to
an intersectional politics that centres the interests and voices of subjugated and oppressed
peoples. Pregurative ethics models a rejection of centralized and hierarchical power/
knowledge, and the cultivation of power-with as a way to build horizontal and
empowering relationships through knowledge production. An insurrectionary power/
knowledge brings these commitments together to expose and oppose exploitative,
oppressive, and hierarchical modes of knowledge production. It is oriented towards
collaborative and anti-oppressive forms of knowledge and anti-hierarchical regimes of
truth. Social movement research should actively produce concrete and relevant
knowledges useful for grass roots struggles for justice. Its planning and process should
also be consistent with an ethics of anti-oppression and preguration, wherein the resulting
power/knowledge reects collaboration with, and centres the interests of, people silenced
and marginalized in political discourse. Framing these ethical questions in isolation can
only push so far against a regime of truth that perpetuates many injustices.
An insurrectionary power/knowledge highlights the most incisive aspects of movementrelevance, anti-oppression, and preguration to facilitate a multidimensional struggle.
It composes a nuanced intersectional analysis of power/knowledge that nurtures individual
and collective capacities to produce truths oppositional to and incommensurable with
broader systems of power and domination.
This is not to devalue scholarship throughout the academy already actively resisting
academic power/knowledge. This article marks but one contribution to a much larger
ongoing integration of relevant, anti-oppressive, and pregurative ethics into social
movements research. Certain scholars even conceptualize their work as contributing to a
Foucauldian insurrection of knowledges (see Day, 2005; Ferguson, 2011; Foust, 2010).
Unfortunately, many such interventions remain rather partial and disconnected from the
other modes of critique covered in this article: while focused on opposing and subverting
one form of power embedded within the academy, we can easily neglect the others. The
importance and role of anti-oppression for ethical research, for example, may not be
welcomed by groups we might engage with through participatory action, the organizers we

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consult with in interviews, or the writings we review for movement histories. Neither does
research sensitive to the dynamics of power in a given movement necessarily result in
knowledge relevant and useful for activists engaged in struggles against oppression, nor
preguration always realized through scholarly investment in movement politics. These
political and ethical questions are intertwined: a consistent opposition to exploitation,
oppression, and hierarchy requires that we acknowledge their uniqueness for social
movement research. Movement-relevance, anti-oppression, and preguration are
complementary principles, but they emphasize different aspects of power/knowledge in
our research process. Bound together as an insurrectionary power/knowledge, they compel
a substantive re-/orientation of scholarly work. It provides leverage to bend otherwise
unyielding methodological and theoretical frameworks towards a new politics of truth
(Foucault, 1977, p. 133) oriented towards the proliferation of local and subjugated
knowledges.
The concept of insurrectionary power/knowledge encourages subversions of academic
practice that are open-ended but not aimless. Operating on the level of ethics, it is
adaptable to a wide range of research concerned with social justice movements. Though it
requires a critical orientation to both the knowledge we produce and the movements we are
engaged with, it does not rely on a xed methodological or epistemological framework.
It functions through a renewed set of research ethics to open up new possibilities, scholarly
engagement with movements in struggle. An insurrectionary power/knowledge directs us
towards processes of cooperative and cumulative capacity building alongside social
justice organizing, and towards knowledge production that erodes our varied complicities
with power. Building research towards an insurrectionary power/knowledge, social
movement researchers can become active contributors in struggles for collective liberation
in social justice struggle and academic practice.
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. In the following pages I focus primarily on scholarship connected to social justice organizing; research with
fascist, racist, anti-feminist, and other movements warrants a dedicated analysis.
2. Cis supremacy refers to how experiencing and identifying with ones gender as assigned at birth is assumed
and enforced. For a Foucauldian analysis of how it interlocks with other forms of power, including within
movement contexts, see Spade, 2011.

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Timothy Luchies is a PhD Candidate at Queens University, Kingston, Canada, and an activist
engaged in various corners of the radical left in Toronto, Ontario. Hes currently researching the
development of anti-oppression in anti-authoritarian and anarchist politics.