Beyond the critical: reinventing the radical imagination in transformative development and global(ization) studies

ABSTRACT

Evidence is mounting of severe planetary and civilizational crises, interrelated and mutually constitutive of one another at unprecedented scales caused by the ‘globalization' of a hegemonic mode of civilizational ‘(mal-)development.' Critical scholarship in both Development and Global(ization) Studies faces numerous challenges. In this article, we argue that critical scholarship needs to be radically transformed to become radically transformative. This means that we need to critically revisit what identifies both fields as “critical”, at the meta-theoretical level, as a joint transformative project, fundamentally independent of capital’s discursive lexicons and historical logics. An ontological recognition of the truth and a new dialectic of the truth and the real help enact an action-oriented agenda to explore the potentials for liberation. It is now time to bravely explore the realm of impossibility by re/imagineering alternative lifeways beyond capital, beyond fossil fuel, and beyond commodity-oriented cumulative growth and their associated narrow rationalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-development
• post-globalism
• radical transformative scholarship
• utopia
• radical imagination
• new ontologies

Acknowledgements

We wish to express our gratitude to the editors of this special issue, Paul Bowles and Henry Veltmeyer, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their highly constructive feedback and their open-minded and encouraging reception of our arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Imagineer (v.), a blend of ‘imagine’ and ‘engineer’, indicates ‘To devise and implement (a new or highly imaginative technology, concept, etc.)’, according to Oxford English Dictionary. The term first appeared but remained rarely used in the literature in the early 1940s, and then later has been used more technically by creative industries like the Disney corporation since the 1980s. We liberally use the term here to refer to the intertwining of both the imaginary and the practical elements of creating utopias.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

S. A. Hamed Hosseini

S. A. Hamed Hosseini is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the lead editor of the Routledge handbook of transformative global studies (2020), author of Conscientious sociology (2013) and Alternative globalizations (2009/2011), director of UON Alternative Futures Research Network, and founder and chief editor of ‘Common Alternatives’ initiative (www.thecommonalts.com). He has conducted mixed-method (quantitative-qualitative) interdisciplinary research on Collective Cognition and Social Closed/Open-mindedness, Global Justice Movements, Post-capitalist meta-ideologies, Social and Communal Well-living, Applied Social and Community Informatics, and Open Big Data.

Barry K. Gills

Barry K. Gills is Professor of Development Studies in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. He is founding editor and Editor in Chief of the journal Globalizations and Rethinking globalizations book series (Routledge). He is currently involved in the launch of the Global Extractivisms and Alternatives Initiative (EXALT) based at the University of Helsinki. His current research focusses on the role of global extractivism within the global climate emergency and radical transformation. He is the author of A perfect world: The myth of cosmopolis in global history (2016), and the co-author (with late Andre Gunder Frank) of The world system: Five hundred years or five thousand? (1993). He has co-edited numerous books including Globalization and global politics of justice (2013), The global politics of globalization: Empire vs. cosmopolis (2013), People power in the era of global crisis (2013), and Globalization in crisis (2011).