The call for activist research is becoming ever louder in our contemporary world. Despite the numerous activist projects in the 20th century – both in the sciences and (especially) in the arts – the current tone of the call for activism is rather agitated. We see it in quite a few of the requirements for accessing various funding tools e.g. on an EU level; in the call for global perspectives in history-of-science teaching; in the museum sector, where decolonization is a central claim. And we miss it in many projects funded in the context of cooperation-development. It is therefore extremely timely to interrogate ourselves as to how to position ourselves within our respective research and teaching activities with respect to a whole new set of obligations and exigencies that are inherent to the activist requirement. And even more, it appears crucial to us as historians, anthropologists, and epistemologists of science, not to simply adhere to the ‘new normal’ of activist research, but to interrogate and problematize its pertinence from case to case. In other words, the panel proposes through indepth descriptions of four research and teaching trajectories to raise the following question for discussion: What characterizes adequate or good activist research that does not blindly follow the jargon we are used to reading in various pamphlets, but that is able to take into consideration the particularities and vulnerabilities we encounter in specific contexts?