ABSTRACT
Over the last few years, socially engaged researchers and activists in South Africa have participated in a range of research projects in education and other areas of social policy. They have deliberately conceptualized and conducted research in and through communities where the challenges of poverty, oppressive conditions, and social exclusion are pervasive. In doing so, they have explicitly set out to stimulate discussion about these conditions and their underlying causes, to mobilize responses to these, and to raise public consciousness about the issues confronting such communities. This has also led to the emergence of stronger links between socially committed researchers based in academic institutions and community activists. It has stimulated the development and uses of research in communities, having direct effects on the accountability of public representatives about the use of public resources, and by implication, on how academic scholarship is viewed.
