Examines how Zapatismo, the political philosophy of the Zapatistas, crossed the regional and national boundaries of the isolated indigenous communities of Chiapas to influence diverse communities of ...North American activists.
Grievances and an urgent awareness of the need for social change are necessary but insufficient catalysts for the formation of powerful and robust social movements. While this realization has led ...observers of social movements to attend to a wide variety of structural and subjective factors, in the alchemy of radical social change and the grassroots collective action that fuels it one of the most important yet under considered elements is the radical imagination. In this paper, I map the concept of the radical imagination and the methods necessary to study it in action. A collective activity produced through dialogic encounters rather than an individual possession or faculty, the radical imagination is our capacity to conceive of the world as it might be otherwise, and it animates successful movements for social change. Since the radical imagination is something people do together it is also a profoundly social phenomenon bearing the marks of the activist culture and political context in which it is enmeshed, and the forms used to mediate and circulate it. This, in turn, has profound consequences for the way activists sustain themselves, organize for social change, and connect with others beyond their ranks. Drawing on research conducted since 2010 with radical activists in Halifax, Canada seeking to 'convoke' - collectively summon into being - the radical imagination, I reflect on the relationship between the radical imagination, activist culture and context, and movement building in the age of austerity.
Against a backdrop of austerity, securitization, and the rampant enclosure of public spaces and democratic processes including the university and scholarship, this article critically explores what ...prefigurative engaged research – research capable of not simply documenting what is but contributing to struggles for social justice and social change – might look like, what it can contribute, and what its limitations are. Beyond familiar calls for a “public” or “applied” social science and drawing on a two-year-long project focused on radical social movements and the radical imagination in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, this article explores what politically-engaged social science research might offer to social justice struggles aiming to construct a more just, democratic, dignified, liberated, and peaceful world.
The radical imagination Khasnabish, Alex; Haiven, Max
2014., 2014, 2014-06-12, Letnik:
55060
eBook
The idea of the imagination is as evocative as it is elusive. Not only does the imagination allow us to project ourselves beyond our own immediate space and time, it also allows us to envision the ...future, as individuals and as collectives. The radical imagination, then, is that spark of difference, desire and discontent that can be fanned into the flames of social change. Yet what precisely is the imagination and what might make it 'radical'? How can it be fostered and cultivated? How can it be studied and what are the possibilities and risks of doing so? This book seeks to answer these questions at a crucial time. As we enter into a new cycle of struggles marked by a worldwide crisis of social reproduction, scholar-activists Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish explore the processes and possibilities for cultivating the radical imagination in dark times. A lively and crucial intervention in radical politics, social research and social change, and the collective visions and cultures that inspire them.
Zapatistas Khasnabish, Alex
2010., 2010-02-11
eBook
In the early hours of 1 January 1994 a guerrilla army of indigenous Mayan peasants, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional, emerged from the jungles of southeastern Mexico and declared '!Ya ...basta!' - 'Enough!' - to five hundred years of colonialism, racism, exploitation, oppression, and genocide. The Zapatista uprising was to have a profound impact upon the socio-political fabric of Mexico, and around the world. Through an exploration of the movement's history, aims, political philosophy and practice, and future directions, Zapatistas provides a critical, comprehensive, and accessible overview of one of the most important rebel groups in recent history.
In this article, we critically reflect on the production and measurement of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ both in social movements and social movement research. We do so by focusing on the Radical ...Imagination Project, an experiment in politically engaged, ethnographically grounded social movement research we have sustained in Halifax, Nova Scotia since 2010. We discuss our methodological strategy of ‘convocation,’ distinguishing it from other social movement research approaches, and reflect on the difficulties inherent in practicing these methods within the austere realities and pressures of the neoliberal university. We explore the ways in which the particular complexities of the fraught field and habitus of the would-be academicactivist might be critically assessed and best mobilized to assist in the reproduction of movements, without also unduly reproducing the neoliberal university or its architectures of privilege and power.
Convoking the Radical Imagination Khasnabish, Alex; Haiven, Max
Cultural studies, critical methodologies,
10/2012, Letnik:
12, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article reflects critically on “The Radial Imagination: A Research Project About Movements, Social Change, and the Future,” an engaged social movement research project conducted with ...self-identified “radical” activists in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. In so doing, the authors explore a research strategy that seeks not merely to observe the radical imagination—the ability to envision and work toward better futures—but to convoke it: to mobilize the singular location of academic inquiry to create a research environment within which the radical imagination can be better understood. Through a critical examination of the project’s theoretical architecture and methodological framework the authors investigate the promises, possibilities, and difficulties implicated in critical social movement research carried out through a strategy of convocation, contrasting it with more conventional approaches to social movement research.
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