Epistemic Activism in the United States: Examining Meetings Across the Silos of Civil Society

The realm of civic action is far from unified; studies of civil society have often been likewise divided by discipline, organizational form, and orientation to dominant institutions. In this article, I suggest the critical concept of epistemic activism, which involves both making truth(s) and making them matter, as a way to think across these divides. I argue that researchers may be able to engage with a much broader range of civic projects by using ethnographic methods to examine the knowledge practices of these projects, specifically through attention to the meetings where project actors come together in time and space. In this article, I demonstrate this approach through ethnographic attention to the meeting practices of two quite different projects: a large civic reform coalition whose meetings reveal a politics of epistemic unity, and a place-based immigrant-led justice movement whose meetings enact a politics of listening.