The Line Between Researcher and Activist

As director of the University of Washington’s Center for Human Rights, Angelina Godoy routinely files public-records requests for documents related to immigration enforcement. One such request, seeking a list of all ICE detention centers, revealed three facilities approved to house unaccompanied minors for longer than 72 hours.

She initially assumed that these facilities were only holding children for a short time, as mandated by a 1997 settlement. Godoy filed more requests hoping to learn how many children were being held and for how long. When the records came back, she was surprised to learn that some of the children had spent spent almost a year in a county detention center in Washington — “right here in our own backyard,” as Godoy put it.

Again she asked for records, hoping to discover on what grounds the children were being held. That’s when ICE told the jail to stop releasing information, she said.

At a moment when thousands of undocumented immigrants are kept in detention centers where conditions are described as nightmarish and children are separated from their families, the role of academics like Godoy has been brought to the forefront. As a sociologist who has studied human rights in Latin America, Godoy has lately seen her work shift toward examining immigration and detention policies.

Godoy spoke with The Chronicle about the line between research and activism, how she first began studying human rights, and how her work brings her into conflict with the Trump administration.

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How do you approach researching support for human rights under this current administration, with President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants?

I direct the Center for Human Rights here at the University of Washington, and we have a very particular mandate given to us by the state legislature here in Washington, which is to conduct research in partnership with folks on the front lines of real-world human-rights struggles.

That would include policy makers, it would include advocates, it would include grass-roots groups in the area of immigration. That also includes groups of people directly affected by the current immigration crackdowns, like undocumented folks as well. The work that we do, while we’re all scholars and we publish in academic journals and we attend academic conferences, we also seek to direct some of our efforts to research that would be directly useful for real-world improvements in human rights. In that regard, we take direction — not in terms of scholarly methodology or analysis, but in terms of the topic areas to look into — from folks who are in the trenches of struggles to defend immigrant rights in the current context.

There’s this idea of academics as cold, indifferent researchers who just engage in their work for knowledge and knowledge alone. So I was curious: How do you walk the line of academic researcher and human-rights activist — and do you think there is a line?

I think there’s lots of different ways to be an academic researcher; there’s lots of different ways to be a researcher, period. And as a person who teaches and practices in human-rights research, I think some of those commitments to real-world issues are particularly strong and are particularly important.

That said, I think that’s different than activism, and sometimes I kind of bristle when people equate the two, because I have too much respect for people who are on the ground doing activism, whether that means organizing in communities to build power for real change or advocating in the court of law. Sometimes people wrongly perceive socially engaged research as activism, or they perceive those two as a blurry line between the two of them. And different people have different thoughts about that.

Me personally, I think there’s work that I do without wearing my academic hat, that I would call activism. Sometimes I attend protests, for example, but I’m doing that on my own time as an individual that just wants to be an engaged part of the communities in which I live. When I’m thinking about my academic work, I’m thinking about the tools of academic inquiry and research, and how I can put those at the disposition of folks who are really on the front line fighting for change.

I don’t see myself as that frontlines leader in that way.

Did you ever expect your work with researching human rights and Latin America to dovetail into the American political moment, the way it has right now?

No, to be totally honest. And it has dovetailed in many ways. I’ve trained as a specialist in Latin America, and I hold those commitments pretty dear.

I feel like there should be more of us in the world focused on that part of the world and more people in this country having a deep understanding of Latin American realities in terms of human rights. I was initially reluctant to involve myself in a new area of inquiry because I don’t want to abandon that work, and I haven’t abandoned it.

But it was primarily in response to reports of just widespread fear in the communities right here, very close to where I live and work, and even from my students themselves, that I started thinking, you know, I’m the director of the Center for Human Rights. The research of the center shouldn’t just reflect my own interests and training; it should also reflect the commitments of what human rights even are. We can’t do everything, so I felt we had to find a way to do something in response to this crisis situation.

What first got you into human-rights work and drew you to Latin America in particular?

It was my own personal experience. I grew up mostly in the United States, but my mom was from Colombia, but she has passed away. As a kid, we would travel to Colombia, and it was a very important part of the person I’ve come to be, straddling these two cultures and languages and societies. I think that that has shaped me in all kinds of ways, but as a scholar, it’s certainly shaped my interest in questions of deep inequalities and violence in societies.

My own family was touched by violence, perhaps politically motivated violence, in Colombia, and that gave me an impetus to start thinking about human rights as a particular response to those kind of violent acts.

So those things have shaped me fundamentally, essentially from birth, and I think that has also led me to an impatience, personally, with sometimes sterile scholarly debates and an eagerness to direct at least my own research energies and teaching energies to things I perceive as really urgent human-rights concerns.

As a sociologist, how do you arrive at the areas of research you’re looking into?

My primary understanding of myself right now, although I’m certainly trained in sociology and that training is essential to the way I tackle the research questions I take on, I think of myself more as an interdisciplinary human-rights scholar. In particular, it’s hard for me, now having served as the director for the center for 10 years, to separate some of decision making about the areas the center should move in and should work on from my own individual research interests. Those are somewhat intertwined sometimes.

I would say in both areas, I try to look to ways that I think the research can be channeled toward outcomes that are productive in the sense of justice or human rights or the broader enjoyment of human rights. That’s not to say that discussions that have less real-world relevance aren’t worth doing, but those aren’t the things that motivate me and make me get up in the morning.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.