Lived Experience Interview:
Dr. Michelle Fine — Critical Social Scientist, Activist, URBAN Founder

In this interview, conducted at the 2025 URBAN National Conference, Dr. Michelle Fine, one of URBAN’s founders, reflects on her work in academia and with marginalized communities, emphasizing participatory research and epistemic justice. Stressing the importance of collaborative research, humility, and accountability; Fine advises emerging researchers to avoid extractivist research, engage with movements, and leverage their privileges for collective impact.

JCEC:
Can you tell me a bit about yourself, the work that you do, and how you ended up being connected to the URBAN Research Network?

Michelle:
My name is Michelle Fine and my parents were both Jewish refugees from Poland. My mom was the youngest of 18. My dad was an orphan and only child. They came to this country in 1921. He sold Plumbing Supplies. She was an unpaid housewife. She did depression, he did America — the hetero-splitting of affects in immigrant families — where he does strong and moves into the world and she lays in bed with migraines. So, as a little kid, I kind of watched that splitting and thought, “She’s so smart. How come she always is in bed?” and I grew up knowing that voices of progress and voices of love and loss sleep together with each other. They aren’t really separate discourses, and there’s lots to be known in those who hold the affect of pain and loss.

I was always involved in movements, growing up: women’s movement, civil rights, Vietnam. I got a PhD in Social Psychology at Columbia and studied how did people think about and explain injustice. Then I got a job at Penn and I started doing work in communities with battered women’s organizations and schools. I provided expert testimony in court cases, for girls to get into boys’ schools and Black kids to get into largely segregated white public schools and class action lawsuits about racial and class (in)justice in schooling, and then I got a real job at CUNY, City University of New York, and left University of Pennsylvania.

I’ve always been interested in — although I didn’t have the language — what we would call epistemic justice. Like, whose knowledge counts? Who gets to author the stories that circulate with certainty in the academy, in mainstream media and in the hallways of policy making? I trace that epistemic skepticism to my thinking as a little girl, “My mom knows a lot, but my dad, I’d like to follow him out the front door, because he’s doing America.” It was an assimilationist fantasy, with a deep under-current appreciation for the knowledges left behind (in bed, in prisons, on the lower track in schools, in communities vulnerable to state violence).

Fast forward … I’ve had really a glorious set of opportunities to do research with women in prison, with queer youth, with Muslim American young people post 9/11, with kids in foster care. So, the line of vision of our work and ours, I’m referring here to the Public Science Project (www.publicscienceproject.org), where we co-produce/engage research with movements for justice; we conjure/facilitate critical participatory research by and for communities under siege, as one humble resource in these massive and intimate, small movements for a world not yet. While we don’t believe epistemic justice or research is the only answer to gross material inequities and violence, we collaborate with the belief that epistemic justice — critical inquiry and knowledge production from and with those most impacted by injustice – can be “of use” for policy change, nutritious for community building and reflecting back to communities how we might contest the dominant lies being told about these communities. This I believe is an obligation of critical scholars in times of rising fascism. So that’s who I am.

I’m currently at the CUNY Graduate Center. I teach critical psychology. With Maria Elena Torre and others, I help to facilitate the Public Science Project. I’m also on the faculty of University of South Africa, and the faculty at Moondani Balluk — Indigenous Institute at Victoria University in Australia. I’ve been extremely fortunate to be able to do work around the globe, sitting the beside scholars/everyday people/movements that are critiquing what is and imagining what could be, and relying on their own experiences and stories to transform policy, popular education, and community projects.

So how did I come to URBAN? I don’t know. I think I was at AERA (American Educational Research Association) and Mark Warren, Ron Glass, and John Diamond were sitting around, maybe with Dana Cunningham, who’s now at Tish at Tufts. We just started cooking up an academic freedom dream: “What would it mean to take seriously – within and beyond our universities – the deep ethical commitments to community-based practices; the deep intellectual commitments to community-driven research and the epistemic commitment to ‘no research on us without us’?” So, we were like a rump group. We got a couple of grants and…it’s gorgeous…I don’t know, how long has it been? 10 years? 12? And then we all brought our students and our babies. And then there were urban planners. And then there were community-based researchers. And then the [URBAN geographic] nodes started. And it’s really beautiful. It’s like a mangrove, you know, those plants that grow and lean over and they dig in the in the ground? It’s like a mangrove.

I saw Celina Su in the hall at CUNY and she was like, “I feel bad not to be able to go the whole time.” I was like, “Me too.” But you know what? New people are carrying it forward and it’s incredible work feeding the desires, and shifting through the engagement of generations of critical scholars, including students and community members. Brett Stoudt, Maria Elena Torre and Sarah Zeller Berkman, they brought young people they’re working with. We build conversations people want to be having; URBAN attracts audience of folks who are good listeners and are dedicated to deep, respectful inquiry “with.” Five of my students just presented downstairs and, you know, we were cramming into small space and time limits; they each had to tell a good story in five minutes. But the audience just helped and grew to fill the space. So it’s really beautiful and beautiful at a time like this, when we’re all living through fascist assaults on knowledge and immigrants and universities and people of color and women and trans folks to be together, to build knowledge we trust.

It’s important to note that at URBAN, by design, we are not simply a movement of like-minded folks, but are actually a collective of differently positioned people, from various contexts/lands/struggles, who share a commitment to inquiry and ethics and respect and dignity and research for justice. But it’s not like we all agree. We share a critical respect for history, for theory, for inquiry, for arts, for storytelling, for challenging dominant lies, but also reimagining what’s possible.

And the last thing I’ll say is that it’s gotten clear to me in our work — and I think here [at URBAN] as well — that we’re all always asking and checking ourselves, “To whom are we accountable? Who lives on your heart? Who needs to know about the work we’re doing, but also who’s our audience?” And those aren’t always the same people – who we are obligated to and who we need to convince. When we work with women in prison, as a research collective we are deeply accountable to their families, their communities, other women in prison, and people they’ve harmed. We are gathering evidence for why the state should invest in college in prison — our audience, at least in NY, is typically white up-state legislators, and so there’s a generosity around understanding. We’re going to speak in many tongues, right? This isn’t collusion, it’s strategic empirical justice work.

JCEC:
How do you tend to think about collaboration and what kinds of collaborative relationships or practices are you or your organization engaged in?

Michelle:
All of our work is collaborative and all of my teaching, I would say, is collaborative/participatory. I think I’m truly curious about the gifts in whomever I meet and humble enough to know we’re all going to screw it up and say something wrong and be offensive, and maybe we can figure out a question worth asking together, from a broad range of participants to understand a thicker, more critical landscape of social life – injustices/joys and freedom dreams. From years of working in unusual research collectives, and running our Summer Institutes on Critical Participatory Action Research, I am convinced that most people – very differently positioned people – want to be learning with each other to help open up questions that are shut down/censored/buttoned up/criminalized. So, I tend to be most interested in building research collectives of people collaborating across groups, what Maria Torre would call a “contact zone” — differently positioned people coming together, sharing our knowledges, our partial understandings of the world and then, together, crafting a question, analyzing the data, figuring out what kind of materials or community products or policy documents or theory should come from the work. So, for me/us/collaborators…it’s not like I want to do research primarily in my own community. I’m most comfortable when we’re very differently positioned and we have no shared assumptions, but we share a desire to interrogate deeply, historically, through intersectionality, toward action – together. I of course respect people who are committed to: “I want to work in my own community. People like you are not part of my world.” But that’s not my jam. My jam is: could we imagine a project together behind bars, in the shadows, in the margins, that interrogates the history/structures/policies and systems that have wrought severe injustice (pain/violence and privilege) – and how else things might be organized? And the way I think about that is never that I’m studying “a populations,” e.g. women in prison or queer youth or Muslim Americans but that, together, we’re interrogating systems…carceral systems, educational systems, Islamophobia that privilege people like me and harms others. We’re all implicated. We’re all in it. Obviously, we’re not all harmed in the same way, but together. So, I’m a kind of sucker for solidarity, even though I know it gets used in the creepiest ways. I’m involved in Jewish Voice for Peace, which works for Palestinian justice. That’s kind of thrilling to me…to be in a group identified through an identity in alliance with those that are different. It’s not just “us for us,” it’s “us for a broader imagination who’s in our world.” That’s why we say, Never again – for anybody.

So, collaboration is expanding the moral community while understanding there are power issues and that we’re going to fuck it up. We’re going to engage what Maria and I called choques, borrowing from Gloria Anzaldúa. Clashes that are inevitable when working across power lines. It’s going to happen. I’m going to say something wrong. Somebody’s going to screw it up. Hopefully being able to build enough trust among us as co-researchers, that we can move through it. Most of our projects, to be honest, have a life well beyond the “end” of the project. They continue. We did the work initially in the prison in 1994 and we’re still working with everybody who’s still alive. Kathy Boudin is no longer with us, Pamela Smart is still in prison – but we continue our work on the outside, and the inside, 30 years later. We’re all still doing projects with children of women who are incarcerated, or women who are getting out because they’re able to demonstrate that they were being abused at the time of the crime. We just become kind of chosen family of researchers/friends/shoulders to cry on and laugh with. As we collaborate, over time, we are attentive to questions of who gets paid? Who gets credit? Who needs child care? Who are we accountable to? What are our commitments to epistemic justice, and epistemic violence? How do we organize ourselves to be decolonizing, challenging carceral logics, anti-racist, attuned by queer/disability justice, sensitive to immigration politics – how to we make critical injustices visible and not make people vulnerable? These feel like a pretty sacred nest of principles of participatory inquiry.

JCEC:
Based on your experience, what would you say are some collaboration-best-practices that you would suggest others use in their collaborative relationships — particularly in this current context of great social upheaval and uncertainty?

Michelle:
Particularly white people sometimes think we have a right to go into anybody’s neighborhood and pull data like their low hanging fruit; that is, engage extractivist research. So avoid that. If there’s an issue you’re interested in and the movement attached to it, become a part of the movement and engage in that. Understand the knowledge that existed long before you. Understand the inquiry and curiosity that existed long before you. Figure out how to be of use and what questions might be productive for the movement. That doesn’t mean you evacuate your own knowledge. It doesn’t mean that you deny your own power. It doesn’t mean that you’re just a tape recorder for impacted people and then you bring it to white audiences. It means you do the generative, dialectical work of grappling, solidarity, figuring out questions that will feed the movement/honor the community/help address a local issue..

We do a lot of work with communities that are saturated in aggressive policing; we are engaged within the movement for abolition/divest in policing and invest in communities. In schools this means remove the police and metal detectors, invest in relationships, restorative justice, humane discipline policies. And yet when we engage community-based research, many people say, “I don’t want NO police,’ I just want to be policed the way you are, Michelle. I just don’t want them killing my kid.” Or high school kids will say, “I hate the cops in my school. They make me feel like a criminal. But when they’re not there, I don’t go to the bathroom all day because I’m scared.” That is be gentle with people/movements/evidence that boil within deep contradictions of the present moment. Work with communities to understand and unpack the contradictions – don’t just report “Most people want….” And ignore the outliers. Work through the hard with communities, to reimagine what else is possible.

It’s boring to say you need humility. But you need humility.

And don’t confuse distance for objectivity. Distance is just a different kind of distortion or privilege. So much of social science educational scholarship has been conducted from what Sandra Harding called a God’s eye view, as if if you’re too close you can’t see clearly. We refuse the belief that distance is objectivity, and engage instead what Harding calls “strong objectivity” – bringing together many differently positioned people with experiences, lines of analysis, commitments that reflect a broad diversity of perspectives, and then we share knowledge, craft a common question, gather materials and engage theoretical/historic/empirical work is together. It takes a while. Choose good friends and don’t enter territories thinking you know the answer. And if you’re going to do a literature review on the issue, make it critical, because the literature that came before you probably demonizes, pathologizes or writes through a deficit perspective about the community you’re looking at.

Finally as we are in the midst of political fascism, the rise of dominant lies and the criminalization of inquiry or critique, we as social scientists have an obligation to ask the hard, speak the unspeakable, collaborate with friends/colleagues/neighbors who are under siege, transform and migrate/dedicate the resources of the university to be of use to movements for justice. Both material and epistemic resources.

Thanks