Scholarly Activism: The Peña Framework

A theoretical standpoint

In this framework, scholarship carries responsibilities that extend from the formulation of a research question to the continuing consequences of its publication. Those responsibilities concern who can participate in producing knowledge, how interpretive authority is distributed, and whether the work expands people’s capacity to understand and act upon their own histories.

My central proposition is that the conditions under which knowledge is produced help determine what becomes knowable, whose interpretations become authoritative, and what possibilities for repair can follow. Exclusion from knowledge production is therefore itself a substantive problem for scholarship.

I develop this standpoint through my work as a Black German American adoptee, adoption scholar, and founder of BGHRA. Its particular grounding matters. A framework emerging from this location must remain attentive to differences within Black German communities and to the limits of any individual’s authority to represent them.

1. Community members exercise intellectual authority

People whose lives are studied contribute concepts, interpretations, questions, and historical understanding. Their intellectual contributions require acknowledgment and attribution, including when they emerge through community organizing, family research, correspondence, or conversations outside academic institutions.

This principle changes the starting point of inquiry. Researchers must consider what community members want to understand, what they already know, and which prevailing explanations they contest.

Community authority does not imply unanimity. Differences of generation, geography, adoption history, language, gender, and family circumstance may produce competing interpretations. A responsible framework preserves those differences and makes room for disagreement.

2. Positionality creates continuing obligations

A researcher’s relationship to a community shapes access, trust, interpretation, and the consequences of publication. Positionality therefore requires more than a statement of identity at the beginning of a project.

Researchers must examine how their institutional standing, personal relationships, and professional ambitions influence the work. They must also remain willing to reconsider interpretations when new evidence or community criticism reveals their limitations.

Shared identity can support understanding without guaranteeing it. Membership in a community does not confer permission to disclose another person’s history or speak on their behalf. My own standpoint gives me particular responsibilities, including the obligation to distinguish my experience from the experiences of others.

3. Historical accountability includes examining how evidence was made

Documents are produced within relationships of power. An adoption file, welfare report, photograph, or newspaper article records an event through particular institutional purposes and assumptions.

Historical accountability requires attention to those conditions. Who created the record? For whom? Which categories organized its account? Whose explanation could enter the record, and whose could not?

Archival silence must also be interpreted carefully. Missing documentation can limit a conclusion; it cannot automatically establish that a relationship, experience, or community did not exist. Scholarship should identify what the evidence supports, what remains uncertain, and how the archive itself shapes the questions we can ask.

4. Narrative authority includes privacy, refusal, and revision

Participation in research should preserve a person’s capacity to set boundaries around their own life.

Consent requires attention to audience, context, reuse, translation, and digital circulation. Agreement to one interview does not settle every future question about how its contents should appear elsewhere.

People may also change their understanding of their histories. New records, relationships, or experiences can alter what an earlier account meant to them. Ethical scholarship makes room for that development and communicates honestly about the practical limits of correcting material already in circulation.

Greater visibility can carry costs. Scholarly activism must therefore respect a person’s decision to remain private, decline participation, or leave a question unanswered.

5. Preservation and access are forms of intellectual work

The survival and accessibility of knowledge influence who can participate in scholarship.

Archives, translations, community gatherings, educational resources, and sustained relationships create the conditions through which histories can be examined and transmitted. Their intellectual value includes the questions they make possible and the people they enable to enter a conversation.

This principle directs attention to barriers such as cost, language, disability, geography, and institutional affiliation. It also requires recognition of the labor involved in maintaining access over time.

A project’s public value depends partly on whether the people connected to its history can find, understand, question, and use its results.

6. Reparative practice connects knowledge with possibilities for action

I use reparative practice to describe work that addresses the continuing consequences of historical exclusion, displacement, and misrepresentation.

Its forms may include correcting public accounts, improving access to records, preserving endangered materials, supporting cultural learning, or informing efforts toward recognition and redress. The appropriate purpose must emerge through dialogue with the people concerned.

Repair cannot be presumed complete because a story has been published or an institution has acknowledged a history. Its meaning and adequacy remain open to assessment by those affected.

Scholarly activism consequently asks researchers to explain how their work may contribute to change, identify the limits of that contribution, and remain accountable for consequences they did not intend.

Relationship to RCTA–TRACE and rekinning

These concepts operate at connected levels.

Scholarly activism establishes my position on the responsibilities of knowledge production. RCTA–TRACE provides a conceptual framework for investigating adoption, racialization, cultural passage, and belonging. Rekinning concerns the work of renewing or making relationships with family, community, culture, place, and history after interruption.

Together, they connect questions about lived experience with questions about scholarly practice: who interprets an adoption history, how evidence is evaluated, what remains accessible to the adoptee, and which possibilities for connection the work enables.

Questions for applying the framework

The framework invites researchers, educators, archivists, and cultural institutions to ask: Who helped determine the questions, and whose concerns remain outside them? How are community members’ intellectual contributions recognized? How are disagreement, uncertainty, privacy, and refusal respected? Who can access and use the resulting knowledge? What continuing responsibilities follow from the work? How will its consequences be assessed, and by whom?

These questions make scholarly activism a practice that can itself be examined, criticized, and revised.

Further exploration: the 2020 keynote

My keynote, Scholarly Activism: The Black German Heritage and Research Association (BGHRA) and Black German Studies in the United States, explores the experiences and ethical questions informing this standpoint. Delivered on November 5, 2020, it provides an earlier account of its development through community work and scholarship.

Read the shortened 2020 keynote →