Navigating the Borderland of Scholar Activism

From Stalker to Board Member: Navigating the Borderland of
Scholar Activism
Before I examine my role in the narrative practice of the Movement for Single Payer Health Care,
it is important for me to locate myself within the movement and explain the process through
which I arrived at this location. My current location within the movement is the outcome of
almost a decade of involvement as a scholar activist. I learned much from academic works dealing with health care reform in the United States, but I was left with questions about what had
occurred at a more local–grassroots–level. Although more recent works, which examine the
Obama era of health care reform, discuss grassroots support of reform in greater detail, they still
favor unpacking state-level activities rather than grassroots action in their analyses (Hacker
2009; Starr 2010; Jacobs and Skocpol 2012). I decided, based on my understanding of feminist
theory and feminist critiques of knowledge production (Devault 1999; Smith 1999; Collins
2000), that I could learn more about the movement if I studied it from the vantage point of those
marginalized within it. This decision pushed me to study the Movement for Health Care Reform
from a standpoint that has historically been marginalized within it–that of the Single Payer
Movement. The Single Payer Movement is a collectivity of organizations and individuals that
share one foundational goal—establishing a nontiered system in which the state is the sole financier of basic health care. I have spent the past decade working within and studying the movement—by collecting field notes during face-to-face events as well as conference calls, conducting
both formal and informal interviews, and analyzing the content of historical and contemporary
documents produced by the movement during the past three decades. This journey involved my
movement from outsider status to insider status within the movement and a transition in my identity from student of sociology to scholar activist.
When I first became involved with the Movement for Single Payer Health Care, in the fall of
2004, I was very much an outsider. I had never before been deeply involved in a grassroots organization, and I would not have called myself an activist. I was a new master’s student in sociology who had decided that I could best change the world through scholarship. I thought that being
an “outsider” was a necessary component of “objective” research. I was also new to the issue of
health care reform. The grassroots activists that I met early on were well-educated in something
that I had only recently started learning about. One such expert, Julia, then president of
Missourians for Single Payer (MoSP),1 was my gatekeeper into the Single Payer Movement. Being
studied was just as new to her as actually doing research in the field was new to me. At first, she
referred me as her stalker. After reflexively analyzing my role as a researcher, I realized that this
label of stalker was more than a jest, it was an actual assessment of who I was to her and to the
organization. A stalker can be defined as someone who you don’t know and don’t trust, but who
also follows you around and observes you. A stalker’s presence is at least troubling, if not frightening. According to this label, I was there to observe them, follow them, and perhaps pester them but
not to be a part of them as a trusted and helpful member. At this point, I did not make any contribution to the narrative practice of the organization other than as an interesting side note as Julia’s
stalker. I was also only privy to information that one might share with a “stalker” at public events.122 Jou