Editors: Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber. Contributor: Erika Biddle

Plenty of academics write articles for obscure journals on transgression or interrogate race, gender and class, but almost none are found in the streets. This is the classic bargain of academia: you can think subversive thoughts as long as you don’t act upon them. Case in point: the firing of Constituent Imagination co-editor David Graeber from Yale University’s anthropology department… While this collection will likely be most interesting to those attempting to do radical work within the academy, it is relevant to anyone interested in (re)building the alter-globalization movement and creating a new world “in the shell of the old”. –Matt Wasserman, The Indypendent

What is the relationship of radical theory to movements for social change? In a world where more and more global struggles are refusing vanguard parties and authoritarian practices, does the idea of the detached intellectual, observing events from on high, make sense anymore? In this powerful and unabashedly militant collection, over two dozen academic authors and engaged intellectuals—including Antonio Negri and Colectivo Situaciones—provide some challenging answers. In the process, they redefine the nature of intellectual practice itself.

The book opens with the editors’ provocative history of the academy’s inherent limitations and possibilities. The essays that follow cover a broad range: embedded intellectuals in increasingly corporatized universities, research projects in which factory workers and academics work side by side, revolutionary ethnographies of the global justice movement, and meditations on technology from the branches of a tree-sit in Scotland. What links them all is a collective and expansive re–imagining of engaged intellectual work in the service of social change. In a cultural climate where right-wing watchdog groups seem to have radical academics on the run, this unapologetic anthology is a breath of fresh air.

This book is one of a kind. This book answers the question of what anarchist social studies, as opposed to conventional Marxism or liberalism, might look like. It combines a searching discussion of methods of research with substantive issues such as ‘Who is the researcher?’ Arguing that research is engaged or it is nothing, that academics who have no commitment to fundamental social change generally cannot produce work that illuminates the world and sparks the radical imagination, the various authors represented in this volume have collectively made a critical contribution to knowledge. –Stanley Aronowitz, Professor of Sociology, CUNNY Graduate Centre

here is the book