While it has been fashionable to think that academic research benefits marginalized groups, representational and methodological choices have often served to produce and legitimize marginalizing practices. The contributions to this volume reveal how authors have sought to engage with and transform their scholarly repertoires into tools of analysis useful for political action. We hope to encourage scholars, activists, and activist-scholars to reflect upon the complementarity of their academic and activist praxis, and to remain committed to unsettling both disciplinary norms and institutional boundaries. This is a task of particular urgency given that scholars are experiencing more pressure than ever before to become the organic intellectuals of the status quo.Table of Contents: Acknowledgements/51. Lumpen-City: Discourses of Marginality| Marginalizing DiscoursesAlan Bourke, Tia Dafnos, and Markus Kip/9Part I | Contesting Discourses of Marginality2. Understanding Obama's Discourse on Urban PovertyDavid Wilson and Matthew Anderson/433. Legitimizing Violence and Segregation: Neoliberal Discourses on Crime and the Criminalization of Urban Poor Populations in TurkeyZeynep Gönen and Deniz Yonucu/754. Homelessness as Neoliberal Discourse: Reflections on Research and the Narrowing of Poverty PolicyMark Willson/1055. Samuel Delany's Lumpen Worlds and the Problem of Representing MarginalityLisa Estreich/131Part II | Contested Representations6. Indigeneity and the City: Representations, Resistance, and the Right to the CityJulie Tomiak/1637. Palestinian Refugees and Citizens: Trajectories of Group Solidarity and PoliticsSilvia Pasquetti/1938. Sexual Violence and the Creation of a Postcolonial Ordinary: Engagements Between Street-Based Sex Workers and the Police in Machala, EcuadorKaren O'Connor/2279. Making Sense of Failure: Why German Trade Unions Did Not Mobilize Against the Hartz-IV Reforms-Partisan Research in Frankfurt, GermanyMarkus Kip /257Part III | Methodological Reflexivities10. Participatory Practices: Contesting Accountability in Academic-Community Research CollaborationsAlan Bourke/29111. Lost in Translation: The Social Relations of an Institutional Ethnography of ActivismKate M. Murray/32312. Shifting the Gaze "Upwards": Researching the Police as an Institution of PowerTia Dafnos/35513. Our Streets! Practice and Theory of the Ottawa Panhandlers' UnionMatthew R. McLennan/38914. Afterword: A Call to Activist Scholarship/409(End)Notes/417Contributors/442