The notion of the artivist, like the earlier term ‘cultural worker’, asks more of the artist than to produce work with ‘relevant’ content. Both formulations re-position the artist as an agent of social change. This may call for art world activism – engaging the art world as a system that mirrors and reproduces inequalities and is thus a site of struggle in its own right. But it may also require a departure from the art world as it is customarily seen and an embrace of what I’d like to suggest we think of as art’s worlds – spaces not purposed for ‘art’ but which, ironically, provide scope for art’s innate liberatory characteristics free of the commodification that drives the art industry. The irony here is that the death of ‘art’ in favour of some borderless terrain (visual culture?) may in fact hold the seed for the rebirth of art as a democratic practice. In thinking about artivism within an academic context, it’s necessary to reflect on the relations between universities and art’s worlds, notably the general tendency of fine/visual arts departments in aligning their practice with the elite art world. This observation introduces questions about the role of universities in researching and advocating socially engaged art, and whether the conditions exist, particularly in the South African setting, for academic staff and students to embody praxis when facilitating or implementing artivist projects. In exploring these questions, I draw on my earlier participation in the Cultural Workers Congress and Community Arts Project (c, 1988 – 1998) as well as on my work with the Africa South Art Initiative (since 2005). In referencing the work of these organisations, I place emphasis on their social positioning and articulation in relation to art’s worlds and universities; and in reflecting on their successes and failures in manifesting praxis.