The Radical Imagination Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity

The idea of the imagination is as evocative as it is elusive. Not only does the imagination allow us to project ourselves beyond our physical and temporal limits, it also allows us to envision the future, individually and collectively. 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 scholar-activists Khasnabish and Haiven explore the processes and possibilities for cultivating the radical imagination in dark times.

A lively, accessible and timely intervention that breaks new ground in speaking to radical politics, social research, social change, and the collective visions that inspire them.

Max Haiven is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Public Policy at New York University, USA, and teaches at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. His research focuses on the fate of the imagination under contemporary forms of capitalism. His work on the imaginative dimensions of finance and the broader social trend towards 'financialization' has appeared in leading journals including Social Text, Cultural Studies, and Mediations. He is guest editor of a special issue of the journal TOPIA on 'The Financialized Imagination and Beyond'. His work on the radical imagination and social movements has appeared in journals including Cultural Critique, Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, and The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies.
Alex Khasnabish is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, NS, Canada. His work focuses on the radical imagination, contemporary social movements, globalization, and anti-capitalist/anarchistic social justice struggles. He is a founding member of Anthropologists for Justice and Peace, an adjunct scholar with the Globalization and Autonomy Project, and co-director of the SSHRC-funded Radical Imagination Project. He is the author of Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (Zed Press), Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility (University of Toronto Press), co-editor of and contributor to Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political (Duke University Press, forthcoming), a contributor to numerous edited volumes, and his work has also appeared in Affinities, AmeriQuests, Anthropologica, Critique of Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology Hot Spots, Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies, Ephemera, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, and Upping the Anti.

Introduction: The Wealth of the Radical Imagination in the Age of Austerity
1. Convoking the Radical Imagination: Global Research Starts at Home
2. What's Life without a Party?: Forms and Failures of Radical Reproduction
3. Struggles Without and Within: The Times of Oppression and Anti-Oppression
4. Social Networking the Radical Imagination: New Manifestations, New Methods