The relationship between political, social & cultural activism and institutional(ised) forms of knowledge production has been repeatedly problematised. Often posed in terms of a division between the ‘activist’ and the ‘scholar’, a division that many times runs through the very social experience of subjects engaged in these endeavours, there have been multiple scholar-activist attempts to explode these categories and/or ‘blur’ the boundary between these different kinds of knowledge production. The proliferation of scholarly work about, for and with social movements continues to pose the question of how to transgress the scholar-activist impasse in ways that overcome the frustrations encountered in the cul-de-sac of reified categories and identities and the possibilities of a post-disciplined world. This research thread is situated at this nexus, seeking an engagement with the political questions of knowledge production in ways that are relevant to social movement(s). Unlike traditional approaches to engaged research and cultures of politics, however, this research thread looks at the problems and proposals developed by movements and others as vital processes of knowledge production themselves, not as points of arrival but as points of departure; open therefore to changes through precisely the encounters from which our research emerges, research that interrogates the possibilities of new connections in as much as it involves communities at the level of their self-organisation and self-representation, yet is not fearful of the disjunctures of conflict. Our understanding of policy and of the politics of culture is therefore informed not by the field of policy studies, strictly understood, but more precisely as a cultural-political field in which policies are not simply effected by the legal and political entities of the traditionally ‘political’, but also the sites of struggle over the meanings, norms and values that shape the cultural and social terrains. Thus, we are concerned with how inquiries are mobilised and are mobilising as processes of organisation.