Ecologies of the radical imagination

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics
• social movements
• social theory
• radical imagination
• social change
• social change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Alex Khasnabish is an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian writer, researcher, teacher, and organizer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. He is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His books include What Moves Us: The Lives and Times of the Radical Imagination (co-edited with Max Haiven), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Max Haiven), Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Ethnography, Activism, and the Political (co-edited with Jeffrey Juris), Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global, and Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility. [email: [email protected]]

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 410-2010-2024].