Here’s my initial note after our first meeting and leading into our second:

We had a great first meeting on Sunday.  There were five us (me, David, Erin, Jessica, and Zak), and we talked about each of our projects, our interests in activist research, the reading on the different historical forms of activist research, and how to design the rest of the class.  I’ll type up my notes on the meeting and send them to you soon.  For now, I want to give you an idea of our provisional plan for the class, and to give you the reading for this week (starting a little later – Sunday, 3:15-5:00pm at Arise).

The reading for each week will be light (10-30 pages), and we will take turns selecting readings for each week.  Given that, on the one hand, there is so much potentially awesome stuff to read on these issues, while, on the other hand, we have limited time due to our already overcommitted lives, we cannot possibly hope to cover everything potentially important in this class.  We are going to try to avoid imagining that there is some ideal method of ‘militant research’ that we need to learn how to approximate.  Instead, we are going to treat this class as itself a project of activist co-research: creating conditions for us to have mutually beneficial encounters with each other, our projects, and readings about other people’s theories and practices of militant research.   In light of these considerations, we will read a small amount each week that can fit within our limited schedules, while trying to carry out the following purposes with the class:
- learning of practices, theories, histories, and experiences of different approaches to militant/activist research (in different contexts and types of activism)
- addressing how the readings resonate with our own projects — talking with each other about how we pick up different things  from the readings as important in relation to our attempts to combine our activism and research (considering both commonalities and differences)
- learning about each other’s projects as windows onto different activist activities in the Twin Cities and beyond
- exploring ideas together — highlighting common questions and tensions out of our discussions on the readings and our projects, and thematizing these in our ongoing investigations throughout the class (picking up on these questions in later classes in light of further readings and further experiences in our practices, and possibly selecting particular readings that speak more directly to these questions)
- supporting each other’s projects through helping each other talk through our concerns and questions about them — and maybe even collaborating on some practical projects that address our common questions and, seeing how what we are doing is related to what others are doing, our potential overlaps between our research in the context of our activism(s)) — these are some ways that we could feel like we are a part of a group doing activist research in the TC (and it’s totally up to us how far we take the extent to which we constitute this group more practically collaboratively)

I hope you’ll see that our commitments to this class are really quite open and depend on what we want to do with each other.  There is certainly no imperative for us to have a homogenous level of commitment to the class: we can be very flexible and variable in how we each commit to the class — taking up some of the above purposes more so than others, depending on how they fit symbiotically with each of our own life/work/learning/activism situations.

You can download here the reading for the first week: an article called “Building Coalitional Consciousness” by Cricket Keating (a Women’s Studies / Political Science Professor, and Popular Education activist).  It’s quite short (about 15 pages).   We were inspired to read it because it gives an excellent overview of a type of militant research that was touched on in the first readings: the women’s consciousness-raising groups from the 2nd wave feminist movement.  It then gives a nuanced critique of them, and concludes with a potentially powerful reworking of them into a “coalition-building” approach that includes considerations of “relational oppressions” including, in addition to gender oppression, those of class, race, sexuality, and others.