MILITANT RESEARCH
2.1.2 Engaged scholarship
Activist research refers to a tradition of engaged scholarship that sees knowledge production as a
'societal intellectual enterprise' (Weiss, 1979), a collective endeavour that articulates new forms of
political action with new ways of mobilising and elaborating projects as part of a 'scholarship with
commitment' (Bourdieu, 2000). According to the Australia-based critical place scholar Marcia
McKenzie (2009), this engaged scholarship is an 'intervention': a process of knowledge production
that aims to mobilise new research imaginaries in the public sphere. By developing an activist
methodological approach, my research engages with a tradition of militant, feminist and decolonial
research and with the experience of militant research projects, such as areaciega, Observatorio
Metropolitano and Oficina de Acción Comunal, which aim to generate knowledge with and for -
rather than from or about - the political communities involved in processes of transformation.
The term' engaged research' is an attempt to reconcile the non-descriptive and emergent quality of
'militant researchers' who seek to co-produce theories and practices of alternative knowledge, with
what Latour considers a multiplication of 'modes of existence': the experiences, tonalities, particular
conditions that require specific ontologies and languages (Latour, 2013, p. 288). Such engagement
replaces the confirmation of laboratory hypotheses with a 'scholar activism' seeking to fulfil the
requirements of academic institutions and epistemic communities while, at the same time, it is
committed to sustaining the work of the communities involved in the co-production of knowledge
(Derickson and Routledge, 2015, p. 9). The use of collaboration and co-production, ethics as a care
practice, and situated standpoints reflect this commitment. Donna Haraway argues that this situated
engagement does not mean abandoning the production of rational knowledge that produces
'objectivity as positioned rationality' as an "ongoing critical interpretation among 'fields' of
interpreters and decoders [...] does not pretend to disengagement: to be from everywhere and so
nowhere, to be free from interpretation, from being represented, to be fully self-contained or fully
'formalisable' but to deploy a 'power-sensitive conversation'" (Haraway, 1988, p. 590). In my
research, the potential of such conversation to transform urban planning lies in its political nature as
a shared public debate about the interactions that take place in the polis.
My approach to collaborative research seeks to establish a 'dynamics of pragmatic learning of what
works and how' (Stengers, 2005, p. 195) by creating collaborative spaces of encounter. These spaces
of exchange enabled practitioners to identify the material and immaterial conditions that have
facilitated or constrained their practices, and to reflect on the empowerment strategies employed to
overcome their blockages. Following principles of co-production by design (Zamenopoulos and
Alexiou, 2018), the research involved stakeholders from different backgrounds, professions,
interests and demands (Foth and Axup, 2006). The design assumed that "knowledge(s) are
contextual, situational and interactional" (Mason, 2002, p. 63), and that activist research is often
'messy and emotional' (Askins, 2009, p. 10). It employs an iterative process designed to embrace
'the unexpected and unanticipated, the difficult and awkward, the messy and complex' (Punch,
2012, p. 91), with each phase contingent on the previous one.
In their reflection on the methodological implementation of collaborative research, British and
South African co-production researchers Beth Perry and Warren Smit argue that the role of 'active
intermediation', as a 'set of interstitial practices between research and practice' is a key,
'foundational aspect for the reflexive practice of academic-activists. Although in this doctoral
research, I was not able to engage in 'structured dialogues' during the fieldwork, analysis and
writing, there is a shared concern that "accounts of design and methods were insufficient to capture
our practices within our respective contexts" (Perry and Smit, 2023, p. 688). This is one of the
reasons why I created an online repository to document the research process.
With the aim of producing a research with, rather than about, the communities involved, workshop
and interview participants are not regarded as data providers but as actors who take part and
contribute to the research process. The participants were part of a network of trusted relationships
forged through years of activism. Some of them were directly involved in the fields under study -
municipalism, commons and planning, while others were contacted specifically. They are all
involved in social and municipalist movements at the local and trans-local levels, are part of a
community of activist-researchers working on urban commons, or are activists and professionals
working on questions that shape economic, social and spatial urban configurations.
[…]
2.1.3 Militant research
A relevant influence on how the OM developed its militant research practice was the work of the
Madrid-based feminist collective Precarias a la Deriva (2004) and their self-inquiry into female
precarity. Spanish feminist activist and translator Marta Malo de Molina (2004) argues for the
production of 'common notions', and traces the idea of a 'militant research' back to the 'workers'
inquiry' of the Italian operaisti, feminist consciousness raising groups, institutional analysis based
on pedagogy and psychotherapy in France, and various experiences of co-research, such as
Colectivo Situaciones in Buenos Aires, or the Collective Sans Ticket in Brussels. According to
Malo de Molina, these experiences share 'concept-tools' such as co-research, self-valorisation;
departure from the self, intersectionality, micro-politics, economy of desires, or lines of flight. Their
practices outline three main lines of intervention: a) the creation of collective processes of
knowledge production that combine the use of major and minor knowledges; b) the production of
knowledge for emancipatory social movements through a virtuous loop from practice to theory to
practice; c) they consider research "as a lever for interpellation, subjectification and political re-
composition" that created 'common notions' in the search for forms of cooperation and resistance
capable of transforming the material condition of metropolitan realities (Malo de Molina, 2006).
In addition, Colectivo Situaciones reflects on the figure of the 'researcher militant' as a
counterpower with specific decisions and procedures, identifying a performative-connective
function of militant research that is triggered by a 'desire for the common when the common is in
pieces' (Benasayag and Sztulwark, 2000), This reflection points to questions relevant to this
research, such as,
How do we create consistency between the experiences of a counter-power that is no
longer spontaneously unified nor does it desire an external, imposed, statist unification?
How do we articulate the points of power and creation without creating a hierarchical
unit responsible for 'thinking' for 'everyone', for 'directing everyone'? How do we trace
lines of resonance within the networks of resistance without subordinating others or
being subordinated ourselves? (Colectivo Situaciones, 2004, p. 99, my translation)
The Argentinian feminist Verónica Gago, a founding member of Colectivo Situaciones, reflects on
the relationship between the production of conceptual frameworks and the capacity of militant
research to reframe the situation, that is, to "name and valorise modes of existence that denounce
and combat the modes of exploitation and domination" (Gago, 2017, p. np). Gago uses three
examples from Argentina's recent history to illustrate how this strategy reframed the popular self-
organisation in the 2001 crisis as the creation of a 'destituent multitude' (Hardt and Negri, 2005), the
rise of populist left politics as the return of Maquiavelo's 'Prince (Gramsci, 2017), and the
community-based responses to the neoliberal structures of precarity as the production of
'entramados comunitarios' [communal lattice] (Gutiérrez Aguilar, 2018).
[...]
Mediated Translation
Another of such ANT procedures is the task of mediation to “transform, translate, distort, and
modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry” (Latour, 2005, p. 39). I will argue
that this mediated translation, operates at different levels in this research: from Spanish to English,
from practice to theory, from activism to academia, and vice versa. First, the linguistic translation is
from English to Spanish in most - but not all - of the theoretical and academic constructs and from
Spanish and Catalan to English in most - but not all - of the political and practice-based
contributions. The linguistic aspect of translation is the aspect most often addressed in the academic
literature written in English, especially in research carried out in environments and languages
unfamiliar to Anglo-Saxon researchers. Secondly, a different dilemma arises when the translation
from Spanish activism to British academia also means a cultural translation from experience to
report. Although academic translation - as much as transcription (Bucholtz, 2000) - is supposed to
be a technical process capable of accurately reproducing the source oral or written expression, it is
also assumed that there are "no such standards [of rigour, as in data collection, analysis,
interpretation and reporting] exist for translation of translinguistic qualitative research" (Lopez et
al., 2008, p. 1729), and that situated translation is always 'political': undertaken from a standpoint
and within power structures that need to be acknowledged. In practice-based activist research,
where researchers do not see themselves as 'objective instruments', as goal of cultural translation
has a non-neutral intent (Temple and Young, 2004, pp. 163–164). From this situated position and
purpose, meaning is not 'lost' in translation (van Nes et al., 2010), but is transferred from where the
meaning originated to where the researcher stands and in the direction she is looking at. A third
aspect of this mediated translation is the transformation of a dynamic and rhizomatic research
fieldwork into the fixed and linear narrative of a written account, still aiming to produce "a
description or a proposition where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there" (Latour,
2005, p. 128). Instead of simply transporting effects without transforming them, each of the points
in the text may become a bifurcation, an event, or the origin of a new translation.
TRANS/MEDIATORS
3.2 Hybrids and assemblages
Two other key concepts proposed within Actor-Network Theory help to translate the idea of an
ecology of practices into the articulation between municipalism, commons and planning. Firstly, I
draw on Bruno Latour to explain the relevance of ANT theory to this research as a 'change of
topology', linked to the use of concepts such as 'habitat' and mapping as a method of analysis - as
presented in Chapter 2 - and the concept of hybrids as an a-modern ontology, with its relationship to
the idea of a 'meso' level. Secondly, I use the concept of assemblages to think about planning as a
process of 'open-ended gatherings' (Tsing, 2015, p. 22) within a conscious choice for urban
complexity (Stengers, 2000).
3.2.1 A-modern hybrids
Actor-Network Theory, according to Bruno Latour, is:
[...] a change of topology [where] one is asked to think in terms of nodes that have as
many dimensions as they have connections. As a first approximation, ANT claims that
modern societies cannot be described without recognising them as having a fibrous,
thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary character [...]. As part of this exercise of
confronting the categories established by modernity and "to rebuild social theory out of
networks". (Latour, 1996, p. 269)
Figure 3.1 shows Latour's understanding of modern 'purification', which, as I will argue, allows for
an understanding of the commons as a-modern and therefore outside of its dichotomies:
Figure 3.1: Modern purification and translation
Source: Bruno Latour (1993), Figure 1.1 Purification and translation, p. 11.
In his book We have never been modern, Latour contrasts the 'work of translation', which offers an
interpretation of hybrids and networks, with the 'work of purification', as the act along two different
dichotomies. The first organises the world in opposite pairs: human culture and non-human nature,
objects and subjects, and men and women, among others. The second operates between this modern
organisation in separated realities that sit 'above', as the recognised mode of functioning, and a
world of 'hybrids', the networked actors that operate in-between the impossible separation of the
modern constitution.
In this scheme, translation creates hybrids as "mixtures between entirely new types of beings",
while purification separates them into "entirely distinct ontological zones" (Latour, 1993, p. 10).
The first type of elements are 'networks' and the second, the 'modern critical stance'. In The Art of
Being In-between, US ethnohistorian Yanna Yannakakis argues that while Latour considers a
unidirectional mode in which something enters and exits transformed, she proposes a bidirectional
transfer in which something passes and returns through mediators who act as brokers: "bridges
positioned in multiple coalitions whose role in the network requires not only translating but also
applying a 'tactical' sensibility" (Yannakakis, 2008, p. 10). As we will see, I will propose to add
more layers to this multiplicity of mediations.
In extending hybrids into the field of knowledge production, Latour proposes the construction of
'matters of fact' so that they become 'matters of concern'. Matters of concern would then be more
than a modern construction of 'facts', but a 'gathering' of ideas, controversies, forces and fields of
intervention around a given situation, creating a 'descriptive tool' that aims not to subtract but to
'add' to reality. The thick description advocated by Gibson-Graham would then bring in the things
that integrate the partial account of reality given by the 'matters of fact' into something meaningful
for people's lives. It is a theoretical exercise that does not seek to debunk but to 'protect and care':
the main concern in these matters is to fight against simplification and reduction, to accept nothing
less 'flowing with the flow' (Latour, 2014, pp. 24–25):
A matter of concern is what happens to a matter of fact when you add to it its whole
scenography, much like you would do by shifting your attention from the stage to the
whole machinery of a theatre. (Latour, 2014, p. 39)
I will argue that the shift from facts to concerns is a shift towards a theory in 'minor theory' that
operates at the meso level. Following the double meaning in Deleuze's proposition of 'thinking par
le milieu', minor theory operates 'through the middle' of things and 'with the surroundings', that is,
without a priori ideal definitions and inevitably entangled in its habitat (Stengers, 2005, pp. 186–
87). This argument is based on Latour's consideration of 'the social', where he reconsiders scale in
such a way that
Macro no longer describes a wider or a larger site in which the micro would be embedded like
some Russian Matryoshka doll, but another equally local, equally micro place, which is
connected to many others through some medium transporting specific types of traces. (Latour,
2005, p. 176)
Following ANT theory, I argue that such a 'medium' - the "substance regarded as the means of
transmission of a force or effect" according to the Merriam Webster dictionary - is not just an
intermediary but an actant in the meso-scale.
[….]
8.3 Commoning transmediation
The figure of ‘transmediators’ builds on what Latour calls ‘mediators’, as actants that “transform,
translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry [..] No matter
how seemingly simple a mediator may look, it may become complex; it may lead in multiple
directions which will modify all the contradictory accounts attributed to its role” (Latour, 2005, p.
939). For Latour, mediators differ from 'intermediaries' which do not transform what they transmit.
For example, “[a] properly functioning computer could be taken as a good case of a complicated
intermediary while a banal conversation may become a terribly complex chain of mediators where
passions, opinions, and attitudes bifurcate at every turn.” (ibid.). My conceptualisation of
transmediation - a concept triggered by the relevance of intermediary structures and in-between
agents in Berlin's 'urban praxis' [INT-MarkusB] and the common-common partnerships organised
around Decidim [INT-XabierB] - extends Yannakakis' (2008) proposal of a bidirectional mediator
with the possibility of actants operating across different fields of theory-practice and habitats - from
the more 'social' to the more 'institutional'.
8.3.1 Transmediators
In my analysis of the commoning programmes, a particular kind of relationship emerges: a
commoning transmediation that is able to reframe situations by translating meanings between
different arenas: institutional/social, academic/lay, citizen/politician, neighbourhood/district,
city/metropolitan, and so on. These actors defy political science's traditional tripartite segmentation
of policy-making stakeholders of community advocacy, political power, and academic epistemic
production (Haas, 1992). More importantly, transmediators operate at the thresholds between public
administration's demarcation of 'competences' and the overlap and expansion of citizen
participation. They also act in different capacities: as activists, researchers, civil servants, party
members, political advisors, technical consultants or cultural producers. This position stands in
contrast to many debates and discourses on commons and municipalism, which are framed in a
dichotomy between an institutional 'inside' (bureaucratic, managerial, state-driven, rigid top-down
structure) and a social 'outside' (informal, collaborative, dynamic bottom-up process). This division
has been seen as a simplification that fails to reflect the many contradictions and frictions of a
possible public-common articulation: a symptom that "the political vocabulary structured by
oppositions between state and civil society, public and private, government and market, coercion
and consent, sovereignty and autonomy and the like, does not adequately characterise the diverse
ways in which rule is exercised in advanced liberal democracies" (Rose and Miller, 1992, p. 174).
Transmediators' primary function is, therefore, translation, which is one of the operations of what
Stavrides called ‘institutions of expanding commoning’. The other two operations are with sharing,
which keeps the process open, and comparison. While comparison makes different subjects and
experiences relevant and meaningful to each other, the mutual awareness of the difference must be
followed by the translation between views, actions, and subjectivities, which translation negotiates:
Translation seeks correspondences, but it cannot and does not aspire to establish an
absolute, unobstructed mirroring of one language with another. An institution does – or
should do – the same, thus keeping alive the expanding potentiality of commoning.
Indeed, ‘the common is always organised in translation’. Expanding commoning does
not expand according to pre-existing patterns; it literally invents itself. Translation is
this inherent inventiveness of commoning, which constantly opens new fields and new
opportunities for the creation of a common world always-in-the-making. (Stavrides,
2015, p. 14)
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