New article on ORC

[Sam Halvorsen]

Hi all,

I wanted to let the list know of an article I have just written that explores, in part, ORC. It is open access and available here:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/area.12221/abstract

It is primarily a reflection on my PhD and my use of "militant research” - in which I brought together theory and practice as part of what I understood as a broader struggle. As I talk about in the article, exactly what this broad struggle is can be hard to pin down, and I suggest that it can be helpful to try and make critique an important part of doing militant research. More specifically, I discuss the need to do militant research outside the university, which can be quite a constraining place, and look at ORC as an alternative. In turn, however, I suggest that ORC had its own limitations, not least due to our lack of resources, and that more generally we should be weary of institutionalising militant research in any space (inside or outside the university). 

Anyway, many of my thoughts came from some of our previous conversations within ORC, although the opinions are very much my own, by I hope it may serve as some kind of reflection as to what we got up to, and what may become of ORC in future re-incarnations. Indeed as I discussed in another article (http://antipodefoundation.org/2015/02/12/reading-groups-as-radical-research-practice/) I saw ORC as part of a longer history of bringing theory and action together in the context of UK-based struggles.

Anyway, comments/critiques of article most welcome, I am sure others have quite different takes on ORC to me,

Thanks

Sam