ABSTRACT
In this research, I adopted participatory action as well as militant ethnographic methods of enquiry and took a movement-relevant approach to research. Participatory action research is an approach that involves an active involvement of all research participants in a cyclical process of research, action and reflection. Militant ethnography is an ethnography that involves researchers as active practitioners in a group or phenomenon that they are studying. Movement-relevant research is about the production of knowledge that is interesting and useful for the movement(s) concerned. In this chapter, I hope to take readers behind the scenes of activist research and guide them through obscured channels and sometimes off-limits sites of movement action. I document and reflect on negotiating trustful relations with other participants, describe unusual encounters and deep conversations and cultivate common experiences. Through this reflection, the aim is to inject the embodied temporality of human interaction and movement action into the methodological accounts of movement research. It is also an opportunity to say something meaningful about the relation between knowledge and action as well as the changing model of science in the contemporary world. This chapter explains the main features of militant ethnography, movementrelevant and participatory action research as well as justifying the fundamental rationales behind this specific choice of approaches and methodologies for the research about Occupy. I use the insights gained from this analysis to reflect on the researcher’s role in participatory and militant projects. Lastly in this chapter, the relation between knowledge and movement action in the context of a changing model of science is explored. I used participatory action and movement-relevant research as well as militant ethnography because they best reflect the kind of lived experiences that reveal the paradoxical link between knowledge and action – the relation that is crucial in all social movements. Movements value and always seek good, reliable knowledge but many of the decisions that they make and most radical actions that they undertake require a leap of faith into the unknown.
