“The overarching goal of scholarship in service to social justice is not to explain social inequality or social injustice, but to foster social justice, to bring about some sort of change. …
We should ask how scholarship in service to social justice differs more traditional mainstream scholarship. Traditional mainstream scholarship is based on the quest for truth - the phrase “knowledge for knowledge’s sake" captures this sensibility. Traditional scholarship has been extremely helpful to social justice projects, yet, because such scholarship sees knowledge as an end in and of itself, it need not be placed in service to social justice agendas. Much traditional scholarship, in fact, as been far more complicit with social injustice than is typically acknowledged. In part, traditional scholarship must play by a set of rules where neither ethics nor politics is deemed suitable for scholarship endeavors - these are seen as introducing bias into the scholarly process. In contrast, scholarship in service to social justice places ideas and the “truths" that emerge from mainstream scholarship in dialogue with broader ethical and/or political concerns. Such scholarship constitutes a tradition of engaged research designed to help people envision and build more equitable and fair societies, not to help them better fit into things the way they are. In essence, scholarship in service to social justice constitutes harnessing the power of ideas in service to social justice.”
