What does being a scholar-activist imply?
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In this insightful interview, Vasna Ramasar, an associate professor in human ecology at Lund University, shares her journey and experiences as a scholar-activist. She discusses the intertwining of her academic work with activism, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the political nature of research. Vasna delves into key concepts such as polycrisis and prefigurative politics, highlighting how they shape her approach to understanding and addressing global challenges. Through her work with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, she illustrates the potential for transformative change by connecting diverse communities and fostering radical alternatives to hegemonic systems. This interview offers a compelling look at the responsibilities and rewards of combining scholarship with activism.
Muriel Côte (MC). Good afternoon to you Vasna Ramasar, and thank you for agreeing to share your experience as an academic who identifies as a scholar-activist. To begin with, may I ask you to introduce yourself, and what you do as a researcher, as an academic, as a teacher, that brought you to become a scholar-activist?
Vasna Ramasar (VR). Thank you Muriel! I am happy to introduce myself and the many layers that I bring to my academic work. As you say, I am a researcher and a teacher, but also a learner at Lund University. I also acknowledge my standpoint and positionality as a brown woman from the Global South because that shapes and influences the kind of work and research that I do. In recent years I have called myself a scholar-activist - as debated and undefined as that is. I feel it is important to do so, in order to link all that I do in research, teaching, learning, to what I also do in practice within and beyond academia in environmental and social justice activism.
What that means in terms of the work that I do, is that I am an associate professor in human ecology at Lund University. Human ecology is a discipline which strives to be interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, when examining human-nature relations. I have a background in geography as one of my strands, but also development studies, geology, and environmental science. I try to bring these disciplinary knowledges together in my work to better understanding the crises that are unfolding in terms of our ecological systems, but also in our social, economic and political systems that lead to inequality, poverty, war, conflict, climate change, biodiversity loss, etc.
Importantly, my work focuses on seeing the openings for transformative change and just transitions. I approach these topics from a decolonial and feminist perspective in seeking to understand the interconnections over time and space, as well as materially and discursively, that lead to both hegemony of the current destructive system, and the spaces of grounded radical alternatives.
MC. You have come to claim the position of scholar-activist - would you tell us a bit about how this happened, and why it is an explicit claiming?
VR. I think there are two strands of thought that have influenced me on this. One is my position as a decolonial and feminist scholar, that all research is political, even if we don't name it as such. And yet, in many parts of mainstream academia, we think that there is a requirement of objectivity in order for one’s work to be rigorous, analytical and critical. I would like to move away from this idea, and acknowledge that actually, normative positioning in academia is what happens all the time, even if we don't write that explicitly in our work. For me, that ties into the second sort of strand, which is that I work on sustainability and social ecological systems. My work is very much engaged with the trajectory of people and the planet. We are facing potential collapse of some of our bio-geophysical systems, with indicators such as climate change and biodiversity loss. At the same time we are seeing extreme and growing inequality in the world with consequent instability, conflict and worsening quality of life for millions. Given my and others analysis, that these are driven by colonial capitalism, I take a normative position that my research should be meaningful and relevant to societal transformation. I also take seriously the call for transdisciplinary research with society. In saying that, I mean that I want my research to have a normative base, and to have political consequences. So, when I am researching environmental, social and climate justice, I seek to contribute to societal reforms at the same time, whether it is in engaging directly with policy makers; contributing to environmental and social justice, NGO and collective movements, or joining different forms of protest.
Many scholars are actively involved in societal projects, but we often see these roles as separate from each other. I want to make visible the fact that we can be both and they can be mutually reinforcing. I acknowledge that the term is poorly understood and has negative connotations for some, and to me the naming doesn't matter as much as the doing. However, I want to claim it because I think that it allows all of us to open a conversation such as: How is our research political – even when we don’t define it as such? How is our work relevant to the state of the world? What are we doing for transformation? I believe claiming this title, opens up those conversations.
MC. Would you talk a bit about some key concepts through which you are practicing being a scholar-activists, for example that of “polycrisis”. How would you define it, how is this concept used in different contexts, and how why you think it's important to be the kind of scholar-activist that you are?
VR. I mentioned before that I need to act and engage based on the state of the world, and one way to approach this is that we are living in a polycrisis. This is a concept that gained popularity in a moment of economic crisis, with COVID defined as the existence of intersecting and entangled crises. The notion of polycrisis seeks to acknowledge how these crises interact with each other, in an entanglement of a constantly building polycrisis. It has primarily been developed conceptually from western experience, and I am interested in taking an approach to understanding polycrisis from the majority world. My starting point is drawing on ideas from decolonial geographers like Kathryn Yusoff in her book “A billion black Anthropocenes or none”, which is a reminder that people in the majority world, or the so-called Global South, have been living with multiple crises throughout history as a result of colonial extractivism. This decolonial perspective, this view from the margins or from the South, is important because we have narratives right now that this moment in history is worse than anything that has ever been before, and I am not dismissing that in terms of the global scale of geo-biophysical systems we have not seen something like this before, but if you look at particular peoples, at particular land, it is clear that erasures have happened in the past. One key question that is often overlooked is, how have people learned from that and continued to live, to even thrive? So in my work I have used concepts like the polycrisis as an entry point to firstly offer critique to formulations of crisis, and their root causes, in order to understand the interrelated dimensions of crises as experienced by the majority world, and secondly to think about how people cope and learn.
The former research is situated within critical human geography and human ecology fields whilst the latter opens up a space for me to think about prefigurative politics and radical alternatives to development. Prefigurative politics focuses on the practices that are established in the present, to embody the world we want to create. It draws on ideas from thinkers such as bell hooks, John Holloway and Eric Olin Wright as well as the work of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, and many other social movements. I have specifically been working on radical alternatives, which refers to ideas and practices that are countering, contesting, rupturing, the destructive hegemonic system of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, western modernity. In line with Arturo Escobar’s thinking, radical alternatives offer a pluriverse of knowledges to develop alternative pathways, for ways of being and doing in the world. These are partly about regenerating lost ways of working, but also about creating new ways of doing things in the world. Some of the practices that I am interested in include how we create solidarity economies, how we practice commoning, how do we regenerate and share indigenous seeds. For example in the face of industrially controlled food production, how do we bring back the idea of seeing food as part of the social ecological dynamics of a community? How do we recover and support the growing crops together, of harvesting together, of preparing food together, of the conviviality of eating together - as sustenance, culture and care. Coming back to polycrisis, it is a concept that leads me to not just offering a critique to the current global organization of economy, society and politics, but also opening up a discussion about the possibilities of building a world differently, and how the research that we do can support life.
Participation of academics and activists at the Movement for Alternatives and Solidaritry in SouthEast Asia conference (Pangandaran, Indonesia, October 2024)

Community knowledge production at the Movement for Alternatives and Solidaritry in SouthEast Asia conference (Pangandaran, October 2024)

MC. You mentioned before that there are some challenges to being a scholar-activist: would you please tell us a bit about the ones you have encountered, and how you have navigated them?
VR. My personal ethics is that we have a duty as academics, as researchers, as teachers, around knowledge production. Similar to many people who have positions in academia, I have been trained in the western academy and western thought. As a result, one of the challenges for me has been in questioning the idea of the university (in the singular) and learning how to acknowledge and engage with the places of knowledge production that are outside the university. In environmental justice scholarship, we have gained and learned much from movement spaces for example. A concept like “food sovereignty” comes from movements like La Via Campesina. The concept of environmental racism was initially developed by the communities who are fighting it. It should seem obvious that there is a lot that we can learn from outside peer-reviewed scholarship but by and large our training makes us quite insular. We look inwards to develop knowledge rather than outwards citing the established sources. Given the power dynamics of the university these are often male, white and European. We have to make an effort to find other voices and when drawing from outside the body of work of academia, we don't always have the methods to source and use other knowledges in a non-extractive manner. That has been one of the challenges I have encountered but I am grateful that geography is a constantly evolving discipline, and the corpus of work and methods is constantly growing to be more diverse.
A second challenge has been around positioning and power. As an academic, there is a certain legitimacy and authority that you have, by virtue of the educational titles that you hold, and of your place in this recognized institution. This inevitably shapes the power dynamics with the people that we work with. While I try to be self-reflexive in how I work, I am also constantly aware that academia can be very extractive of the world, and especially when there is a dynamic of power where the people we work with might have not as strong language skills, not be as well-versed in international processes, etc. How do we take care not to assert our views, knowledges and politics (intentionally or unintentionally) but actually create a more balanced relation? This is especially challenging in the currently productivist configurations of academia, including the “publish or perish” culture, the need to work towards promotions, and the accelerating pace of research. This has significant implications for our ability to work with communities and with processes that are slow, in order to allow us to make sense of the different timings of things.
I try to live by the Zapatista saying that, “you make the path as you walk it”. This means that there is no singular, golden bullet solution. We all have to try and sometimes I am going to fail and other times succeed. Each time I am trying, doing and learning. In this way, I move forward and I move forward with others, which is also important.
So when I say that I am a scholar activist, I intentionally put on myself a certain burden of responsibility: how do I ensure I am a good scholar and a good activist, when do I wear one hat and when do I wear the other? Audre Lorde once said that “there is no single issue struggle because we do not lead single issue lives”. To me, this ties into the fact that we are not one thing: I am a learner as much as I am a teacher. I am a mother as much as I am a colleague. I am an activist as much as a scholar. You have to be constantly aware, not of how you see yourself, but how other people perceive you and interact with you in spaces. It often requires putting your ego aside, deliberately taking a back seat, and giving space to other people and benefit from just listening, and learning.
MC. Would you please reflect a bit on the way the research funding structure in academia allows or hinders how you navigate these challenges?
VR. I would suggest that most funding is about research excellence, and the idea that you have to do excellent research, rather than societally relevant research. This is changing to the extent that now you have to say something about outreach and societal impact, but that is still not the significant measure of success of most research grants. Additionally, research funding is decreasing around the world, so those spaces become even more competitive. Money makes things messy, but money is also where you exert power. I think it’s important that we are transparent about this, and intentional with funding. There are opportunities for shifting this within research funding. For example the Wenner Grenn Foundation has funded a scholar-activist workshop on the pluriverse, and the Antipode Foundation that broadens the right to the discipline of geography beyond academics, to name two. Although small in relation to the bigger funding, they can have very meaningful impact. Some years ago I participated in a research project that was EU funded, called Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT) with Juan Martinez Allier as principal investigator. A lot of funding was directed to the environmental justice organizations themselves to be equal research partners in the process. I learnt a lot from this model in the way it asserted a different power relation to organsiations, whereby the money and the resources went to everyone participating, rather than just the academics holding the purse strings. I've tried to bring that into my work, even if on a small scale, for example being able to write a research application where the NGO and community partner are recognised as research partners, not just as interlocutors or respondents. This allows me to allocate some of the research budget to them to do work.
What was quite interesting in a grant that I received recently, was a comment from one of the reviewers suggesting that we did not go far enough in terms of outreach. We proposed to write articles and popular media materials with our collaborating civil society movements, and the reviewers suggested that we should also be writing grant applications for them. Feedback like this from national research councils indicates growing awareness about what transdisciplinarity requires.
However its not just about funding. There are non-monetary ways in which you can engage beyond academia. A lot of the time I am doing activist work on a voluntary capacity. I have the security of a permanent position, so I have the opportunity to give back, for example in popular education for climate groups, or spending hours helping to develop something for the Collective Against Environmental Racism that I co-founded. This is done on my own time, which has a different kind of cost, one that takes you away from other parts of your life. It can be fulfilling for intellectual pursuit as well. I have been able to write and publish with people who are not academics because they are actually producing the knowledge with me, and that feels important. I've occasionally made the choice to write things that are not academic because it is what is needed to reach a broader audience. These are opportunities you constantly have to navigate as an academic with certain expectations on you.
MC. One aspect of the work that you do with your colleagues that I think is really interesting, is called the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA). Would you reflect on how that allows you to practice as, and at the same time emerges from, being a scholar-activist?
VR. For me to answer this we need to go back to my earlier point that we are living through a polycrisis, where multiple, entangled, crises are stacked on top of each other and making things worse. Scientific evidence shows that what the international community is doing now in terms of multilateral negotiations and governance is not enough – and at worst could represent forms of delaying action. This has opened a research gap to explore how people can practice transformative change through prefigurative politics and radical alternatives, to a system which ties us into our current destructive mode. In 2018, a small group of activists and public intellectuals founded the Global Tapestry of Alternatives (GTA), and I have been privileged to be one of the founding members. The GTA is a process that seeks to weave together alternatives around the world, whether they are global or local, coming from very diverse perspectives. This builds on the Zapatista notion that has been eloquently developed by Arturo Escobar that we are trying to build a pluriverse, not a singular solution, but a world where many worlds fit together, where many alternatives can sit together with a common foundation around contesting a destructive hegemonic system, and support the flourishing of life. It has taken inspiration from the Vikalp Sangam process that has been happening in India, and the Crianza Mutua process in Mexico. In these contexts, communities of practice have been coming together in order to help build a critical mass of people working in different ways to build life.
First physical Assembly of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives with representation from movements across the world (Nanyuki, Kenya, July 2023)

In seeding the GTA, we asked ourselves how we could have even wider reach. Not with the idea of “scaling up”, but with the idea of “scaling out”. This means we were not seeking to replicate these processes all over the world, like the problematic development sector mentality, but rather connecting and supporting, learning and collaborating with each other together to build different realities and other politics alongside more-than-human life, in the diversity of places that humanity inhabits. We are working to build a pluriverse where there is a foundation of common values, but within the tapestry, each thread is independent and unique. A central aspect of the work is on regenerating as well as creating radical alternatives. We define alternatives as initiatives that are attempting to break with the dominant system and take paths towards direct and radical forms of political and economic democracy, localised self-reliance, social justice and equity, cultural and knowledge diversity, and ecological resilience. Importantly such initiatives are grounded in the praxis of people, and operate in an integrated way to care for life. Through the last six years, it has become clear that there are a plethora of alternatives underway around the world from examples such as the Potato Park in Peru, to degrowth in France, and alternative communities in India – many of them showcased through our website, reports and webinars.
I am part of the facilitation team that holds the process, and through the GTA, I have had the opportunity to work with communities around the world, learning from them, sharing with them, creating and facilitating the sharing that happens between each other. It has been an incredibly inspiring and rewarding process for me as a human being, to see people thrive with alternative ways of operating where there is respect, dignity, and the idea that we can live in harmony with the rest of nature. These things are what keeps me going in the work that I do, and intellectually it opens up the possibilities of transformation in ways that are not the conventional, repeated patterns of development where a lot of attention of Millenium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals are having limited impact on what is happening in the world. The GTA offers a space where we can do transformative emancipatory work, and as an academic, there is an opportunity for me to open dialectical learning between praxis and theory.
MC. Having asked you about the challenges of being a scholar-activist, would you also reflect on the advantages of being an academic in that particular space of the GTA?
VR. Thank you for the question, as I never under-estimate the advantages of my academic position and training. One of the things that is important about academic work is the opportunity to actively exercise analytical thinking and relate praxis to conceptualizations, which allow us to connect conversations that are being written up and happening in different instances around the world. As an academic, you have an opportunity to keep your fingers on the pulse of some of new developments, to read, to listen, to attend conferences, to participate in different fora. It is in fact part of one’s tasks as a researcher, and a luxury to constantly learn. You have access to infrastructure, resources and time to do this, which many civil society organizations and activists do not have the space for. As a researcher, I have the analytical tools to see common threads, and help weave a tapestry of alternatives. I have also been trained with skills in presenting and writing to support social movements articulate positions. I have access to resources that can help us to actually build up these nascent and growing alternatives.
For me as an academic, I also benefit personally in so many ways. As I've said before, as a human, it's deeply inspiring and it motivates me to continue to do this work. Secondly, being part of the GTA allows me to deepen and bring more praxis to a lot of the academic literature and scholarship, around utopias, prefigurative politics, hope, that has happened in a theoretical way, or on a case study basis. Through my engagement with the GTA, I have access to people that it might not be as easy to connect to, for reasons of language, distance, gatekeeping or politics. Being able to do this work requires building trust, respect and legitimacy, and being part of the GTA gives me the opportunity to do so from within movements rather than simply as a researcher/outsider.
However, it is important to acknowledge that this comes with accountability and responsibility on my side as well. I believe that my research is more complex and nuanced because I have checks and balances with people who are working with these issues every day. This means I cannot sit in an ivory tower because I would lose legitimacy with the people I work with. I cannot be clumsy or blunt with lived experiences, or culturally significant concepts, or artifacts, I have to be careful and sharp in what I write and what I say. I may not always reach to my aspirations, but there is an accountability outside of my own value system that makes me hold my research to a higher standard. This is something most academic work would benefit from.
As a teacher, working with the GTA is also an advantage. My students have grown up in a world in crisis. They've grown up knowing that climate change is changing everything, that we are losing species at an unimaginable rate. They live with a kind of ecological anxiety, which is compounded by the state of the world, in terms of the wars and conflicts. There is a lot of despair amongst young people. That has motivated some into action, which is amazing, but for a lot of them, there is paralysis. And I feel that as a teacher, I want them to be critical thinkers, but I also to see these possibilities, openings and hope. And when I teach and present alternatives happening in the real world, I see how they are affected emotively and intellectually, in the sense that their inquiries go in different directions because they have been presented with new places to learn from. It gives them hope - not as something that is for the future, or something ephemeral, but something that is real and tangible and that they can engage with. As a teacher, being situated and rooted in these kinds of processes and activism, I can facilitate these kinds of openings for my students. This includes also for accessing my networks, in terms of internships or research, or simply if they want to contribute and learn. Thus, a second way that being engaged as a scholar-activist helps me as an academic, is in the way it allows me to engage in university education.
MC. How does being situated in the discipline of geography enable some of the work that you do?
VR. Geography gives us nodes to focus on, and tools to think about scale and the politics of scaling in the relations between the local, the national, the regional, the global. It gives us ways of understanding place and space, and the significance of relations being territorially rooted. These concepts come from the discipline of geography, but they are lived by people that are working with radical alternatives around the world. Some things I have understood better because of having a background in geography. For example, what is place, and the many different ways that it is not just a physical location? Or what does it mean to belong to a place or to a space, and how you move from rooted territorial practices that are very local, to connecting globally. It allows me to see the significance of asking what is gained and what is lost in that process, and what is the politics of these moves, as these are questions that geography asks. Relations around scale, space, place and territory allow me to connect both the recognition of polycrisis, as widespread geographically, and temporally, with radical alternatives needing to be local and yet connected globally. They open ways of thinking about politics, geography and time, and I feel like the discipline of geography also shifts based on how people in different areas work with those concepts, so I am excited for that.
The concepts of a tapestry and weaving are also deeply geographical. The very name Global Tapestry of Alternatives, which was thought through and contested a lot, was agreed because it evokes the action of bringing together different threads, that each individually add something, in a way that creates a whole that is more than the cumulative of the diversity of parts. The idea of tapestry is about the action of weaving, and we use weaving to talk about the processes of coming together, which is all about social relations across places and spaces and how people engage with each other and more-than-human life. It comes with an intentionality to it; an intentionality to foster radical alternatives. Weaving refers to the actions of how we encounter each other, and make spaces to exchange our lived experience, and build a pluriversal world. It is the mechanism that brings together, in different ways and forms. It may include encounters between different communities, where they will share about food, and what is food to them. For example it is interesting to note that Crianza Mutua Mexico do not use words like food or health, but rather use the verbs of eating and feeding, which evokes the very active ways that we do this. GTA works to weave by facilitating encounters between them and another community that may be doing similar. It's also about people-to-people exchange, with someone going from one community to another, and actually spending time there to just grow and share and exchange in that way. A lot of the weaving is also done through more mainstream ways such as webinars and regenerative stories, periodicals, assemblies and so forth. However ultimately what matters is how are we building connections between people whom on the surface might seem very different, and how are we exchanging knowledges, ways of being in the world, with each other, how we build solidarity to foster and continue to generate alternatives.
I believe engaging in scholar-activism can offer new ways for the academy to be of service to society, but also ways for academia to evolve so that we think about knowledge production ways that center care, community and a collective project of transformation.
Table des illustrations
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Titre | GTA publication on crisis and alternatives through collaborative knowledge construction |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/28494/img-1.png |
Fichier | image/png, 1,1M |
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Titre | Participation of academics and activists at the Movement for Alternatives and Solidaritry in SouthEast Asia conference (Pangandaran, Indonesia, October 2024) |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/28494/img-2.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 160k |
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Titre | Community knowledge production at the Movement for Alternatives and Solidaritry in SouthEast Asia conference (Pangandaran, October 2024) |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/28494/img-3.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 276k |
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Titre | GTA Women’s Assembly (Nanyuki, Kenya, July 2023) |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/28494/img-4.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 262k |
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Titre | Learning from women of the Amadiba Crisis Committee (Sigidi, South Africa, February 2023) |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/28494/img-5.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 291k |
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Titre | First physical Assembly of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives with representation from movements across the world (Nanyuki, Kenya, July 2023) |
URL | http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/docannexe/image/28494/img-6.jpg |
Fichier | image/jpeg, 360k |
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Vasna Ramasar et Muriel Cote, « What does being a scholar-activist imply? », EchoGéo [En ligne], 70 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 12 février 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/28494 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/133h3
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