A cartography of the possible: reflections on militant ethnography in and against the edu-factory Andr  e Pusey School of the Built Environment and Engineering, Faculty of the Arts, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds LS2 8AG Email: a.pusey@leedsbeckett.ac.uk Revised manuscript received 20 July 2017 This paper examines militant research through the lens of several challenges the author faced when experimenting with it as part of their PhD research. It engages with ongoing debates about the role and complexity of militant methodologies within-against-beyond the university. Specifically it suggests that the political economy of the academy is a challenge to militant research through the growing influence of the law of value within increasingly marketised academic contexts. The paper argues that the academic-recuperation-machine has the potential to assimilate what it terms the ‘minor knowledge’ created through militant research within its circuits of institutionalisation and commodification, becoming just another output or tool in the toolbox. Relatedly it suggests these challenges do not simply require a reflection on positionality vis- a-vis academia/activism, but a collective struggle around academic labour in against-beyond the university and how militant researcher might remain ‘in but not of’ the neoliberal university. Key words: militant research, activism, militant ethnography, scholar-activism, methodology, Really Open University Introduction There has been extensive critical discussion of the wholesale restructuring, commodification and neolibera- lisation of universities (Bailey and Freedman 2011; Radice 2013). It has been argued that higher education has been marketised and students have been reinvented as consumers (Molesworth et al. 2010). But this process has also been countered, both through student resistance (Hancox 2011) and through attempts to reimagine students as producers and radical subjects (Neary and Winn 2009). From January 2010 through to January 2012 I worked with a group in Leeds (UK) called the Really Open University (ROU) and engaged in a series of experiments that attempted to blur the lines of pedagogy and protest. Neither wanting to be limited to being a student activist group nor wanting to lose the productive antagonisms that engaging in resistance engendered, the ROU tried to remain fluid and unfinished. As a co-founder and participant in the group until its demise, I was actively working towards both forwarding, and forming the ROU’s agenda and realising its goals, working as part of it as it unfolded over a two-year period experimenting with a process of militant ethnography. This paper critically reflects on my experiences attempting to navigate and negate the activist–academic divide through experimentation with forms of militant ethnography and action research that were orientated towards the co-creation of what I term ‘minor knowledge’. Building on the recent discussion of militant research within this journal and geography more broadly (cf. Clare 2017; Russell 2015; Halvorsen 2015) it explores lines of tension and contradiction in experimenting with militant ethnography. It is hoped that this discussion will be useful both for those wishing to experiment with forms of engaged and participatory research, as well as militant forms of research more specifically, and those interested in broader debates around marketisation of the university and the developing area of critical university studies. In this journal Russell (2015) argues that militant research involves a disavowal of positivist knowledge and encompasses the production of situated knowledge(s) in its place. For Russell, and I concur, the much discussed activist/academic problematic should be thought of as a struggle over a certain sort of knowing and knowledge The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). Area, 2017, doi: 10.1111/area.12386