Tim Jordan

mi, 22.04.2003 04:55

I'm an academic working at the Open University. Officially I'm a sociologist but for me the main advantage of that is that in the UK Sociology is pretty weak at its boundaries and allows all sorts of intellectual interventions. I have two strands of intellectual work: cyberstudies/politics and protest/social movement studies.

Hello all,


This list is a welcome development. I've had one or two goes over the years
at trying to generate something at the inter-section of activism and
academia and not been able to develop them, so I hope this goes well. I'm an
academic working at the Open University. Officially I'm a sociologist but
for me the main advantage of that is that in the UK Sociology is pretty weak
at its boundaries and allows all sorts of intellectual interventions. I have two strands of intellectual work: cyberstudies/politics and protest/social
movement studies.


For the latter, I've done quite a bit of theoretical kind of work as well as some particular studies of online movements. I'm also an editor of the academic journal Social Movement Studies: journal of social, cultural and political protest. This has been going for a year and conforms to academic conventions of presentation and legitimacy, which have their uses but are also quite constraining. I've just finished some reflections on the nature of current day activism, that tries to draw together a lot of things I've seen passing over my desk (or on my computer monitor via the Internet) and am trying to finish off some work about online direct action or hacktivism.
Which leads neatly to my second line of intellectual work, which is about cyberculture and cyberpolitics. I've worked on notions of power in cyberspace and the Internet and have managed to cross over some of that work into reflections on protest by looking at online civil rights movements and now online direct action.


I haven't been particularly politically active over recent years, or when I have it's been in the realms of local or personal politics. I was heavily involved in tenants politics in Melbourne Australia (which is where I'm originally from) for quite a few years and was feeling quite burnt out when I arrived in Edinburgh to do a PhD right in the middle of the anti-Poll Tax movement. By the time I'd been involved a bit in those protests, not too heavily, I felt that if I never sat through another meeting it would be too soon. Since then I've been part of a parent-run childcare co-operative and have sat watching on the very outer fringes of many developments in protest over the last few years.


I'd echo some of the comments by others. I wouldn't under-estimate the barriers to developing a cultural capital that values protest among academics. When we wrote the forward to the first edition of Social Movement Studies we included the following line: 'the point of this journal is to change the world, though we may be willing or indeed forced to settle for
analysing, reclaiming, theorizing, celebrating, critiquing the kinds of social movements and related cultural moments that themselves have aimed at
or even achieved that grand, that dangerous ambition' and one of the co-founders first responded 'but you can't say you want to change the world in an academic publication'. But at the same time, it would be great to deny and minimise such scepticism.




Tim