The term activist anthropology refers to research, writing and teaching that are directly involved with the efforts of communities, organizations, movements or networks to analyze the root causes of inequality, oppression, conflict and violence to formulate strategies to transform these conditions, and to achieve the power necessary to make these strategies effective. Our program builds on the best of a long tradition of the creative combination of scholarship and social activism within our discipline, while at the same time encouraging critical reflection on both the conceptual and practical limitations of that inherited tradition. Activist anthropology is predicated on the idea that we need not choose between first rate scholarship, on the one hand, and carefully considered political engagement, on the other. Activist anthropologists affirm the importance of empirically grounded and analytically driven ethnography, without recourse to compromised notions of scientific objectivity.
Activist anthropology is an option, an emphasis within our graduate program.
It is not for everyone. The concept The activist anthropology track at the University of Texas is distinctive, perhaps unique, at the national level in its central location within a theoretically-oriented graduate training program. The tradition of US-based anthropologists becoming directly involved with social issues reaches back at least as far as Franz Boas, including some of our discipline's most prominent figures, at times with important, demonstrable effects in politics and public opinion. Public intellectuals tend to carry out their research according to strictly conventional methods, and then use the legitimacy and authority of these scholarly achievements to make political interventions most commonly at the higher echelons of institutional power. In neither case does the impulse for social or political engagement substantively challenge or transform the way anthropological knowledge is produced.