In an increasingly unstable and precarious world in which systems of government have yielded to systems of neoliberal governance– without stable jobs, stable climates, stable borders, or clear lines between public and private sectors– it behooves us to reassert our “the right to research” and perhaps go further. We hope, then, to examine radical possibilities, and speculate on what else might be possible, to contest today’s dominant social imaginaries. Activists themselves, alongside scholars, have made urgent calls for critical research that helps laborers, undocumented immigrants, indebted students, and others to revamp campaigns that have traditionally targeted governmental policies— but must now tackle a complex web of decentralized private-public partnerships, multinational corporations, in solidarity with those who are geographically far, but fighting the same struggles. Both activists and scholars have also made repeated calls for access to and ownership of data, to make sure that those who are talked about have the skills and means to talk back, to watch the watchers and to interpret the research themselves.

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