Paper short abstract:

The paper will present the experience of a research collective organised around experiences of grass-roots and popular education and the first findings of its research on South American political exiles of the 1970s in the UK.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will present the experience and initial findings of a "research collective" in a UK University that studies the experience of Southern Cone political exiles of the 1970s that came to the UK and stayed. The objective of this experience is two-fold. First, it seeks to contribute to the construction of memory among this sector of the Latin American diaspora in the UK in a systematic manner and focusing on the transformation of their political identities. Second, by working across vertical and horizontal collaborations - that is, including different levels of research expertise, ranging from undergraduate students to lecturers, and being cross-departmental - the research is generating important synergies that are streamlining, across different publics, issues related to the study and the politics of memory in current Latin America and Latin American populations in the UK. Thus, based on experiences of grass-roots and popular education this research project seeks to address systematically the issue of exile but it does so by engaging a variety of publics - ranging from politics students to languages and media experts. However, beyond these positive outcomes in terms of public engagement, the research seems to be pointing to the importance of exploring the relationship between the political implications of research and the academic emphasis on the policy impact of research, on the basis that the latter could be a way of obscuring and veiling the fundamental struggles for power embedded in the former.