The Halifax Radical Imagination project hopes to document and broadcast the important knowledge held by social movements about how to make our world a better place.
Interested in participating? We’d love to have you. Please fill out the form below.
http://radicalimagination.net/
From September 2010-May 2011 our research team will be studying the radical imagination in Halifax social movements. We will:
Interview a wide range of activists and organizers about vision, strategies and organizing for a better world;
With permission, post these interviews online to bring activists into positive and unique dialogue;
Host public meetings and a large social movement “summit” in January 2011 to discuss strategy and vision;
Create radio documentaries about Halifax social movements;
Produce a book and articles about mobilizing the radical imagination.
This project is based on the belief that social movements have a lot to gain from discussing the radical imagination and that social movements have important knowledge about how to make our world a better place that needs to be broadcast.
http://radicalimagination.net/about/
About the Project
From September 2010 to May 2011 our research team will be interviewing activists and organizers in the Halifax area about the radical imagination. Rather than just asking people’s opinions, though, we are interested in creating a space for dialogue and discussion between activists and organizers. To this end, we won’t be just collecting interviews and writing about them, we’ll be actively setting up meetings, discussions, focus-groups and dialogues throughout the year.
We’ll be asking questions like:
What events or ideas brought you to political work and (how) have your thoughts changed through your involvement?
What is the role of the imagination in your movement and your own politics?
What would it mean to win? What’s your vision of a better society? Do these visions matter to you and your movement?
What are the barriers to the radical imagination that you face?
This project is guided by several hallmarks that our research team believes are key to critical and engaged social research:
The conviction that committed, critical dialogue and debate about the radical imagination is of vital significance and value to social change movements.
Academic research should be supporting social movement efforts in the pursuit of radical social justice, not merely studying them like insects under a microscope. We are not interested in turning social struggle into academic capital, we want to use research as part of a collective and diverse project to transform the world into something better.
Social movements produce knowledge, critical reflection, and theoretical insights about the world we live in and how we might change it. This knowledge needs to be highlighted.
The radical imagination is not something we “have” but something we “do” and that studying it requires not only “observation” but creating spaces for dialogue, encounter, and creative, critical engagement.
In a nutshell, this project aims to:
Create a space to facilitate dialogue, discussion, and encounter between and beyond activists and organizers in Halifax.
Build a process along with our research partners that seeks to mobilize (rather than just catalogue) the radical imagination.
Archive movement histories, narratives of social struggle, and stories told by people engaged in efforts to create better worlds and make them available to others who are trying to do the same.
Put critical research to work in the service of struggles for social justice.
Okay, those are good principles, but what will this project actually do?
Another good question. Okay, down to the nitty-gritty. Over the course of the next year, this is what the project will concretely aim to accomplish:
The research team will conduct interviews and focus groups with social activists and organizers in the Halifax community about their experiences, politics, hopes, and strategies. With the participants’ permission, the interviews and focus groups will be recorded.
With the participants’ permission, the recording (audio or video, or a transcript) will be posted to the project website.
In January 2011, the research team will host a summit in Halifax to bring together previous and new participants to discuss key issues.
After the summit, the research team will interview many activists a second time, asking them to reflect on and respond to other interviews, etc. With the participants’ permission, these second-round interviews will also be posted to the website.
In May 2011, the interviews will come to a close. The research team will focus on producing a variety of material for public dissemination documenting the project, its process, and its implications. These materials will include radio and video documentaries, a book, the website, and articles for academic and activist periodicals.
A note on theory and method:
This project is motivated, in part, by what we see as three main problems in the academic study of social movements. One is theoretical (the ideas that motivate the research), the next is methodological (the process of the research), and the final one is ethical (what research is for and whom it serves).
The theoretical problem is this. Academics (and most other folks) tend to approach the imagination and, in particular, the radical imagination, as a thing that we all have “inside of us” to some extent. This approach makes sense: our ideas about how the world could be different do need to come from somewhere. But these approaches risk reducing the (radical) imagination to an individualistic approach because it implies the imagination is the private property of each person. To some extent this is true, but we argue that the imagination is always (also) shared between people and within groups and societies, that it is dialogic (meaning that it emerges out of “dialogue” in the broadest sense of the term – a whole web of social interactions).
This leads to the methodological problem. If we want to study the radical imagination, we need to understand it not as a thing but as a process. That means we can’t just go out and interview people and hope to see their radical imagination at work. It means that researchers have to help create the conditions where the radical imagination can be observed. So in this project we are going to try and spark debate, discussion and dialogue, rather than just being “the eye in the sky,” examining activists under the microscope.
These methodological problems imply a bigger “ethical” problem about what academic research on social movements is about. There tend to be two broad approaches that have been tried. On the one hand, some researchers have highlighted the importance of academics as more-or-less impartial collectors of facts. The university, they argue, is an important social institution which tries to find out the truth about the world through a critical detachment. While this might sound old-fashioned or conservative, many radical scholars have used this “ivory tower” position to launch incredibly important criticisms of society that have been of monumental help to social movements. Researchers of this type have tended to choose research methods that focus on going out “in the field” and “collecting data” on social movements, then analyzing that data and writing about it. On the other hand, more recent researchers, led by feminist and anti-racist scholars have created new methods of “action” research, “participant observation” and “auto-ethnography” where the scholar is an intimate part of the movements they are looking at. These scholars argue that just looking down at social movements like an “eye in the sky” is uncritical, rarely helpful and often exploitative. They stress that being a part of the movements is important and that academics need to put their considerable social privilege to work for movements. Often these scholars suggest that scholars take their direction from social movements and create research that serves those movements’ needs directly.
We are inspired by research from both schools of thought, but this project tries to do something a little different. This project is an experiment in thinking about the very specific needs of social movement communities (not single social movements/groups) and the very unique role of the academic researcher. We thought long and hard about what does not exist within and between many movements and also about how we as scholars could find a particularly useful role to play. We arrived at the conclusion that movements don’t have much of an opportunity to think through and come to a common mind about their visions and strategies, and that communication between social movements is often poor, and that movements often don’t address these problems for a variety of reasons (usually because there isn’t enough time or because there’s no consensus on who should organize such a sharing). So we imagined a research project that would experiment with filling this gap.We are not sure it will work, it’s an experiment. We’re looking forward to seeing what might happen.
Meet the team
http://radicalimagination.net/team/
Research Team
Max Haiven comes from an activist family (who live in Halifax) and has been involved since he can remember in anti-capitalist student, peace, labour and global justice struggles. Most recently, he served as the President and Chair of the Political action Committee of CUPE local 3906 in Hamilton (3000+ precarious academic workers) and worked on anti-racist and anti-colonial politics around indigenous rights during the Caledonia crisis. His academic research focuses on the sociology of the imagination as it works in the realm of high finance and the global economy, in social movements, and in arts and literature. He now works as a post-doctoral fellow at Mount Saint Vincent University and lives in Halifax with his partner, his kid, his dog and his cat. More info at maxhaiven.com
Alex Khasnabish works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. He is the author of two books—Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (Zed Press & Fernwood Publishing 2010). He has also written about contemporary radical politics, globalization, and social movements. Khasnabish has been active in student, labour, anti-war, anti-capitalist, and global justice struggles. His political orientation is unapologetically bound to the inspiration of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. He actually believes that learning, teaching, and critically exploring the world can be radical acts. He sees his academic work as an extension of his political commitments to a Zapatista and anarchist-inspired anti-capitalist, anti-oppressive, and anti-colonial practice. He’s imported from Toronto by way of Hamilton, Ontario but now lives in Halifax with his family.
River Smith quit high school with a disdain for the lack of freedom she found there, only to return to formal education eleven years later. A recent graduate of Mount Saint Vincent University, with an interdisciplinary bachelor of arts in Peace and Conflict Studies, River aspires to be more socially and politically active in the community of Halifax and to help create a world where all sentient beings can live with dignity and self-determination.
