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On Making Academic Feminism More Public

The 2010s have witnessed a heightened interest among US academics in engaging with the public sphere, particularly among feminist scholars alert to the fact that women are underrepresented at a three-to-one ratio compared with male experts cited in media discourse. Although this disproportionality is vital to address, our enhanced attention to making academic feminism more public should also account for the fact that public discourse is mediated through corporate-controlled channels. Digital platforms are powerful in creating dialogue about feminist ideas and in organizing creative modes of protest. Yet the commercial mechanisms for public intellectualism in the United States may widen the gap between academic feminists’ thinking/talking and the forms of feminist doing/walking practiced by artists, caretakers, community organizers, educators, public defenders, social workers, and survivor advocates. In this essay, I emphasize how feminist participatory action research not only helps repair this rift but also strengthens feminist scholars’ claims to authoritative knowledge in ways that enhance our impact on both the commercially mediated public sphere and local communities of practice. I show how the feminist public intellectual project can be fortified in these divisive times of fake news by framing it as building the capacity of place-based feminist practitioners to challenge the terms of public debate. Rather than simply studying and being in conversation with activists, then, feminist academics can subsidize them with our access to institutional credibility and resources and by researching methods that elevate their expertise as those who “do” feminism every day.