His is a personal account, and he provides lots of useful-looking links. Hi Richard, thanks for this. Now I'm in a more conventional university job for the first time, and trying to find out what I can do with it. Partly this is through finding that my own logics of research on movements, engaged methodology, radical theory etc. push me away from individualised practice and towards as close an engagement as possible, and partly it's through finding that I now reach the limits of any individual process of thought and research fairly rapidly, so that real development happens in interaction as we articulate a shared implicit knowledge, born out of common involvement in particular kinds of activism, for purposes which are starting to emerge within that activism. What bothers me is all the activists and academics who are on one island or another and don't talk to one another.
Academic specialization is the epitome.
I'm trying to learn how to communicate with people in other worlds, because I think that is the key to what is needed. Activists accuse academics of being reformists or of being all waffle and no action, and academics accuse activists of being irrational and unscholarly. I am of course, being somewhat generalist and stereotypical, as I do know people that make a genuine effort to cross boundaries and explore 'the other side'. A crucial issue here is the distinction between contemplative and active forms of thought - not so much between theory and practice as between theory and praxis. Praxis is then more about active skills than passive propositions, though the latter obviously play a part.