An anti-racist scholar-activist ethic: working in service to racial justice

Although there has been relatively little written to date about the practice of research on the far right, there is growing recognition that the complex ethical and political challenges researchers face are important subject matters in their own right. This chapter therefore brings together scholarship on antiracist scholar-activism with that on the far right and its mainstreaming to explore how the principle of working in service can guide the praxes of those researching race, racism, and antiracism. Centring questions of social usefulness and accountability, the chapter reflects on how the notion of working in service to racial justice offers an orientation that urges us to push back against approaches within far right studies that risk amplifying and legitimising the far right. Instead, working in service to racial justice requires us to place ourselves firmly on the side of communities of resistance and the broader project of antiracism.