Below are some tools that I'm finding useful in developing an approach as an engaged social movement researcher. Do you have strategies that are helpful for you?

1. The question of accountability is a crucial way to frame and understand our work. We can approach it, among other ways, in terms of knowledge production itself. Richard Flacks nicely illustrates this, recalling that a central slogan among radical sociologists in the late sixties was "knowledge for whom?" The question remains pressing, and it begs another: Accountability to whom? One way to answer this question is think about the communities that validate and hence structure our scholarship. With whom is our work in conversation? To whom is it accountable? What relations do the answers to these questions have with each other?

2. Sustaining self-reflexivity involves paying careful attention to the intellectual practices we are trained to use. In particular, this means drawing critical attention to critique as it is generally performed and valorized in academic contexts. Katie King refers to this as the "debunking" mode of critique. I don't seek to repudiate this kind of critique entirely. It certainly has its time and place, both in and outside of the academy. However, it can also obscure and shut down potentially useful conversations and modes of critical inquiry. Debunking frequently focuses on argument and fosters polarization. When does this further an activist intellectual praxis? When might we turn to other modes? And to what ends?

3. If we understand our intellectual practices as enmeshed in social relations, we must also understand the "expertise" we wield as similarly implicated--particularly, I might add, in social struggles. Holding expertise suspect is thus crucial. I don't offer this as a simple tactic of renunciation, however. Rather than simply rejecting some forms of knowledge as "expertise" or embracing them unquestioningly, I want to suggest that we instead look at the kinds of work that they perform and to what ends. Consequently, we might ask: When does academic intellectual expertise have strategic value for the purposes of movements? When does it hinder them? And assuming we have some investment in the democratization of knowledge and knowledge production, how do we develop an activist intellectual practice capable of strategically using expertise without reifying it?

4. Academic intellectual life is often deeply isolating, both in terms of how we conceptualize our work and how our work process is structured. An alternative is collaborative work--not only among academics but also with and among activists outside of academic contexts. For those engaged in movements, this proposed model should come as no surprise. As Colin Barker and Laurence Cox note, activist theorizing is often dialogical, whether in relation to other activists, potential allies, or opponents. It seeks clarity and refinement through the process of conversation and collaboration. How, then, might we integrate these sorts of approaches into our own work? And more fundamentally, how might they challenge and change the ways we presently think about our day-to-day work routines and ourselves as intellectuals?

5. Much of our intellectual work, at its best, is rooted in creativity and joy. Crucially, it is also rooted in love. Unfortunately, this is rarely acknowledged in academic contexts where love is all too frequently eclipsed by motivations of shame, doubt, and fear. Still, I would argue, love is a cornerstone for developing and sustaining vital relations among academic intellectuals and movements. We might understand this tangibly in terms of economies of intellectual work. In other words, where the academy so often privileges an economy of lack--scarcity, ownership, commodified exchange--an activist intellectual praxis might entail a gift economy, as David Graeber suggests. So, what if we conceptualized our relations with movements as profoundly loving gift exchanges? How might this reshape our work and motivations?