ABSTRACT
Critical writers suggest that academic work, thinking and research can be activist in its motivations, processes and outcomes. Activist-oriented research has a long-standing tradition of engaging legacies of feminist politics and participatory and collaborative research processes (Farrow et al, 1995; Gatenby and Humphries, 2000; Moss, 2002; Ramazanoğlu and Holland, 2002; Sharp, 2005; Thomas, 1993). A body of work has explored the role of the academic-activist, engaged academic, politically purposive researcher, and scholar-activist in furthering social change (Chatterton, 2006; Kindon et al., 2007; Mitchell, 2008; The Autonomous Geographies Collective, 2010). Yet there exist few studies that discuss the actual process of working and writing collaboratively from the perspective of both academics and activists across national contexts in the area of sexualities. This chapter looks at how academics and activists collaborate to produce academic and academic/activist work in two projects concerned with sexualities. One is located in India, where Article 377 of the Indian Penal Code criminalizes certain sexual acts.1 After a brief reading down in July 2009, this was reinstated in December 2013, the same year that the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act was passed in the England and Wales. Putting academics and activists across India and the UK into dialogue, this chapter contests the ways in which some nations are seen as moving ‘backwards’, and highlights the need to learn from others who are moving ‘forward’. Instead, we speak as academics/activists who engage in co-producing useful knowledges with which to intervene in local/national sexuality politics.
