Radical Imagination via play: the future of Critical Cultural Studies research

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines a future research trajectory of critical cultural communication research as a practice in Radical Imagination. The author argues for institutionalizing play as a methodology that not only yields metadata regarding lived experiences but also trains the brain to think beyond constraints and radically imagine liberated communities we wish to inhabit.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical Imagination
• future
• social justice
• the justice fleet
• methodology

Notes

1 Robert L. Ivie. “A Question of Significance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 4 (1994): 2.

2 Amber Johnson. “Significance Remixed,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 90.

3 Ibid., 90–1.

4 Robin D.G. Kelley. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), 7.

5 Richael Faithful. “Toward the Heart of Justice,” National Lawyers Guild Review 69, no. 4 (2012): 249.

6 Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven. “Convoking the Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research, Dialogic Methodologies, and Scholarly Vocations,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 12, no. 5 (2012): 408–21.

7 Garry Landreth and Sue Bratton. “Play Therapy,” ERIC Digest 1–2 (1999). Published by ERIC Clearinghouse on Counseling and Student Services. Retrieved from: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED430172.pdf

8 Andrea K. Wittenborn et al. “Emotionally Focused Family Therapy and Play Therapy Techniques,” The American Journal of Family Therapy 34, no. 4 (2006): 333–42.

9 Adrienne Maree Brown and Walida Imarisha, Octavia’s Brood: Science-Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 4.

10 Ibid., Octavia’s, 4.

11 Ibid., 279.