The Duck of Minerva

Can researchers be both scholars and activists?

Academia

by Josh Busby

25 September 2019, 1617 EDT

This is a call for a new series that grows out of a panel held at ISA earlier this spring. We have a few posts in process that come from participants on that panel, but we want to open it up to other contributors under the hashtag #ScholarActivism.

Questions that you could explore include:

  • What’s your idea of the appropriate balance between scholarship and activism?
  • What’s been your experience?
  • Does one’s activism potentially serve as grist for critiques that academics are indoctrinating students?
  • Is activism different from policy engagement?

We welcome your thoughts on these questions and others.

Joshua Busby is a Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the author of Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-author, with Ethan Kapstein, of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations (Cambridge, 2013). His main research interests include transnational advocacy and social movements, international security and climate change, global public health and HIV/ AIDS, energy and environmental policy, and U.S. foreign policy.

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