“We have to thank Ana Antunes and Joy Howard for curating and editing All In—an inter-generational volume of essays crafted by progressive academics and organizers, from disparate fields including labor struggles, early childhood education, anti-racist schooling campaigns, food sovereignty and indigenous research practices. This volume is essential reading BEFORE you celebrate that your university has branded itself dedicated to ‘community-centered research.’ When activist scholarship becomes normative, it's time to worry—and check in with these writers who are deliciously and with complexity committed to deep epistemic justice, democratic participation, decolonizing practices and research for and with movements for justice. These chapters span the intimate and the global. They are borne in universities, in community-based movement spaces, across transnational borders and in yeasty conversations held in labor halls/bodegas/coffee shops/CBOs/childcare centers and even philanthropies where freedom dreams are borne for just research tithed always to action. These are not ‘projects’ but windows into lifetime commitments to building worlds not yet, engaged by those most impacted by social injustice, collaborating with those who are organizing, those who are researching, those who are trying to imagine life with purpose. Each chapter sketches a story about how we might contribute humbly to generating radical evidence toward transformation. Each essay takes seriously the power relations of the world as it is; the vibrant possibilities of activist research crafted at the membrane of university and community; the knowledge nourished in struggle; the joy of solidarities and the heartbreak of structural violence. Written by emergent activist scholars, and some of us who have been around for a while, this volume is a must-read for those who are engaged in democratic participatory inquiry. Ana and Joy, when neoliberalism penetrates our institutions, despair weighs on our hearts, as crises local and global swell—this is just when we need a movement for just research. As books are being banned; language policed; student dissent criminalized; faculty censored and a new McCarthyism seeps into our academic and community lives, you offer us rich sketches of activist desire, resistance, persistence, solidarities and struggles for a world not yet.

Just when it seems so clear the academy is a colonial institution dedicated to profit and reproduction, we read essays that reveal the liberatory possibilities that erupt/disrupt and re-imagine from within higher education at the luscious border with co.

And you will learn a bit about the amazing life story of URBAN, a trans-institutional network that willed ourselves into being, that has held fierce belief that the academy is accountable to struggles on the ground, that participatory praxis is oxygen to movements for an anti-racist/anti-capitalist world to come.”

Michelle Fine, Distinguished Professor, CUNY Critical Psychology/Urban Education and Visiting Professor, University of South Africa

“This impressive volume highlights the promise of community-engaged scholarship for promoting social justice while demonstrating the vital role that URBAN has played in carving out spaces for this work to thrive. It foregrounds a research approach that builds upon the knowledge of those often excluded from vital conversation and demonstrates how deep connections and engagement among scholars, researchers, practitioners, and community-based organizers can create new possibilities for transformative social change. Everyone committed to community-engaged scholarship and a more just society should read this book.”

John Diamond, Professor of Sociology and Education Policy in Brown’s Department of Sociology and Annenberg Institute for School Reform