Political Imagination Research Articles

The ‘ordinary’ violence of national fantasy: otherwise, ‘out of time’ political imaginaries for posthuman literacies and book banning

ABSTRACT In this paper, I ask: How can thinking with posthuman theories of affect in gender and education enable us to trouble current book banning efforts that work to reassert the gender order, namely by aligning heterosexuality with the notion of a ‘core national culture’? And how do post↔feminisms, as more-than-human political practices of knowing/being/doing/feeling/sounding, help us to embrace otherwise imaginaries for ‘literate-techno-bodies’? I begin from the premise that, as the im/material-discursive forces of white supremacist hyper-capitalist cisheteropatriarchy have historically shaped US aesthetic practices and notions of Americanness, gender and hetero-sexuality affectively extend into and entangle with texts, particularly fairytales. My hope is to redirect affective energies to otherwise worlds where gender, sexuality, and literacies are no longer bound to a stabilizing heteropatriarchal metanarrative that violently moves via subtle and not-so-subtle relational networks, including book censorship, state/federal care, parental protesting, and even happily ever after.

Thomas Fulton. The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 371. $75.00 (cloth).

Thomas Fulton. The Book of Books: Biblical Interpretation, Literary Culture, and the Political Imagination from Erasmus to Milton Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 371. $75.00 (cloth).

Artificial intelligence, emotional labor, and the quest for sociological and political imagination among low-skilled workers

Abstract This study examines how generative AI impacts low-skilled workers in their daily professional lives, how it changes the nature of their work, and what, if any, strategies they develop to cope with this new reality. Emphasis is placed on call center agents—an occupational group facing a particularly high automation risk. Drawing on Constructivist Grounded Theory and semistructured interviews in an Austrian call center, we uncover how flawed generative AI tools have increased emotional labor among these workers. This increase is hypothesized to result in agents’ inability to embed their own problems in the larger social context of generative AI’s impact on the labor market, let alone to politicize these problems. They were thus said to lack sociological and political imagination. Our study is the first to link emotional labor with these forms of imagination among low-skilled workers, offering new analytical tools for future research on generative AI’s nuanced effects on the labor market. To empower low-skilled workers, foster their imaginations and address their concerns, we propose several policy recommendations, including targeted education campaigns, enhanced social dialogue, co-determination rights, and tailored upskilling programs. This study thus offers a valuable contribution to scientific research while providing practical implications for policymakers.

Scapegoating Queerness: Associating Egyptian LGBTQIA Advocacy to Western Conspiracy as a Strategy for Aborting Democratization

Focusing on Egypt as a case study, this paper juxtaposes Mubarak and al-Sisi’s anti-queer measures in order to delineate their discursive strategy in framing collective victimhood vis-à-vis Western-sponsored gender activism in an attempt to overshadow the Muslim Brotherhood’s political visibility and reverse the liberal gains of the January 25 Revolution, respectively. This study argues that both presidents’ anti-queer discourse succeeded to abort calls for democratization because of rulers’ capitalization on populist and religious-nationalist idioms in developing a collective victimhood frame as a defensive strategy against constructed threats. Building on the social movement theories’ framing approach, this study unpacks the state’s three-pronged collective victimhood frame by drawing on the revival of Western colonial heritage, sovereignty assertion, and cultural authenticity to validate a generalized repression against non-heteronormative identities and non-conforming sexual practices during the Queen Boat incident in May 2001 and following al-Sisi’s ascension to power from 2014 until 2024.

The mother, the politician, and the guerrilla: Women's political imagination in the Kurdish movement By Nazan Üstündağ. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.

The mother, the politician, and the guerrilla: Women's political imagination in the Kurdish movement By Nazan Üstündağ. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. 272 pp.

Political Imaginaries in the Climate Movement: Youth-Led Groups Constructing Plural Views of the Future

Political Imaginaries in the Climate Movement: Youth-Led Groups Constructing Plural Views of the Future

The Political Imagination of the ‘Lost Decade’

The Political Imagination of the ‘Lost Decade’

Prioritising communities: barriers to climate activism and political imagination among minoritised youth groups

ABSTRACT Minoritised youth voices are often underrepresented in climate action research. Despite the increasing interest in youth climate activism, there is still an overall lack of attention to the perspectives of young people struggling with discrimination, poverty, and other social injustices. In this article, we focus on a diverse group of minoritised youth in Portugal to explore their experiences of climate activism, perceived agency, and political imaginaries of the future. We conducted a qualitative study involving seven focus groups with 55 participants, including young people with a migrant background and/or living in underserved communities in Portugal. Based on a Reflexive Thematic Analysis, we generated three main themes that illustrate participants’ ways of engaging with climate change issues, the barriers that constrain their engagement with climate activism and the challenges in the political imagination of the future. Our findings suggest that minoritised youth would like to have a voice in political debates about climate change and that more inclusive dialogues about climate futures could help bridge existing territorial and social divides.

Ambivalent citizenship: political cynicism, community engagement and belonging among youth in Brazil

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the role of urban peripheries in creating political imaginaries and understandings of citizenship among children and grandchildren of insurgent citizens in urban Northeast Brazil. The analysis draws on data collected through 10 ethnographically informed focus groups with youth between 18 and 35. The article argues that, contrary to beliefs that young people are apathetic about politics or enthusiastic to engage in progressive social movements, youth have an ambivalent relationship with the state, informed by everyday encounters with precarious infrastructure, awareness of previous forms of collective action that determines their civic engagement, and feelings of belonging to home communities. The article suggests revisiting the concept of insurgent citizenship considering new socio-political changes that framed the lives of young people living in urban peripheries in the past two decades in Brazil and proposes ambivalence as a productive theoretical angle to make sense of ruptures and discontinuities in political practices.

INCLUSION, ELIGIBILITY AND FORFEITURE

One of the buzzwords of today is ‘inclusion’. But the idea that everyone should be ‘included’ is a mistake, thoughtlessly reproduced by many. This holds in the private sphere, as well as in the institutional settings of the public sphere. There is very little conceptual analysis of the term, although there is plenty of literature on ‘social inclusion’ and the political vision of including the marginalized. My aim is to show that there are constraints on inclusion – particularly in institutional settings. Participation in social life is a kaleidoscope of inclusion and exclusion practices; this makes social life possible. Without inclusion/exclusion practices social life would be chaotic – if not impossible. Even philosophy journals have submission criteria which permit exclusion: e.g. the paper must not be under consideration by any other journal. Thus, exclusion is not per se a denial of someone’s dignity or a failure to recognize them as a fellow human being. The aim of this short essay is to raise awareness about inclusion and two of its constraints (eligibility and forfeiture), thereby starting a long overdue debate in the humanities.

Far-right Ecology and Geopolitical Resentment at Europe’s Periphery: The Case of Romania’s “Conservative Revolution”

Building on insights from political geography and the social sciences, this paper illuminates the diversity of European far-right politics in general and far-right ecologism in particular by contextually examining a party at Europe’s margins—the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). Based on a discursive thematic analysis, our objective is to show how AUR challenges existing theoretical accounts, predominantly tethered to the Western and Central European experiences. While most influential scholars emphasize far right’s culturalized view of religion and the fixation on immigration, AUR outlines a theological vision of politics and perceives emigration as a critical problem. Moreover, it co-opts the language of anticolonialism to articulate a socio-ecological critique of global extractive capitalism in a semi-peripheral context. These specificities are essential for understanding the party’s outlier position within far-right ecologism: AUR places the environment at the very centre of its programme—and not merely as a strategic add-on to attract voters or respond to domestic or external pressures. To substantiate our claims, we reconstruct three dimensions of its hyper-nationalist, Orthodox geographical imaginary: AUR’s complex, human, and natural resource nationalism; its focus on food sovereignty and the Romanian peasant as an exemplar of sustainable agriculture; and the protection of “the last virgin forests in Europe” as central to Romania’s national identity and prosperity. We conclude that AUR effectively mobilizes historical geopolitical resentment at Europe’s margins and addresses it with a promise of recovered plenitude that endangers democratic politics.

The multivocality of the nation: political imagination and transformation in the emergence of African Nationalism

AbstractAt key moments in history, political understanding and action are irrevocably transformed. What makes such moments of transformation possible? This article examines the emergence of African nationalism in South Africa, following the multivocal appeal to African nationhood made by proto-nationalist leaders and intellectuals. In doing so I examine how new political imagination can reconfigure the structure of political relations and create powerful new possibilities for political organizing and action. African proto-nationalist leaders were ‘intermediary intellectuals’ who used African nationhood to speak to three different political logics of their key audiences: a ‘progressive nationhood’ to their white colonial audience, a ‘unifying nationhood’ to their missionary-educated African audience, and a ‘traditional nationhood’ to their rural African audience. African nationhood thus had a multivocal appeal which allowed proto-nationalist leaders to bring otherwise divided audiences to support a common political project. By bridging these divided communities, proto-nationalist leaders were able to combine resources and strategies from once separated domains into novel forms of political power. Transformation in political understanding was thus a critical enabler of innovation in organization and action because it built a political project where new connections between African and colonial worlds were made politically ‘thinkable’. Speaking to the scholarship on political repertoires and the sociology of anti-colonial intellectuals, this study has broader implications for the role political ideas play in political transformation.

Solidarity and broadening the practices of action research

We live in a world of runaway global social inequality and immanent planetary ecological collapse and action research is more necessary than ever. Solidarity across countries, regions, classes, and ecosystems is the only way out of these linked crises caused by neoliberal capitalism. Action research is a vibrant and heterogeneous set of democratic practices capable of addressing many of these dilemmas. Action researchers have for generations largely been content to develop their own approaches independently and the attempts to create better integrated global action research networks have yet to show the needed success. This essay argues that the lack of collaboration and solidarity across the whole spectrum of action research is an unaffordable luxury. Living up to our own ethical and political commitments, we need to find ways to treat the diversity among our own practices and political visions as sources of strength and dynamism. Beyond this, together we need to make a concerted effort to link with other groups and networks promoting fairness, democracy, sustainability and solidarity because the future without these collaborations is unsustainable.

Was the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission an act of dispossession?

AbstractThe Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) has been described as one of the most comprehensive regional and national governance structures for Indigenous people in Australia. This paper looks briefly at its operational life between 1990 and 2005 and focusses on its abolition, arguing that this was an act of dispossession. The ATSIC was, for its time, a remarkable achievement for both the nation state and Indigenous people. Acting as an institution to both represent and deliver services to Indigenous people, the ATSIC model was, and could have remained, a powerful organisation for enacting critical change. Constructed and then removed by the nation state, the ATSIC's abolition dispossessed Indigenous people of a political framework dedicated to organising an Indigenous collective voice. This dispossession, different from earlier waves of dispossession from land, resources and cultural freedoms, can be understood by the application of critical Indigenous institutional analysis. Through its own structure and electoral representation, the ATSIC had made visible the quest for self‐determination and gave Indigenous people decision‐making powers not since replicated. Redirecting ATSIC's limited decision making back to government exposed the illusion of control. The ATSIC's abolition left a void in the growing capability of Indigenous people to self‐determine and a gaping hole in Australia's national political imagination.

Critique beyond relation: The stakes of working with the negative, the void and the abyss

AbstractThe ‘relational turn’ has been widely embraced in Human Geography and related fields over the last couple of decades as an alternative to the hubris of modern and colonial reasoning. Yet, increasingly, concerns over the extent that contemporary conceptualisations are overly ‘generative’, ‘productivist’ and ‘affirmational’ has come to the fore. There is significant interest in the possibilities for more negative understandings, highlighting failure, attrition, voiding, exhaustion, impotentiality, incompleteness and attributes of ‘non‐relation’. We draw out how, to date, most of these approaches have developed a hermeneutic approach, seeking to bring the negative and the non‐relational into the world as forces of disruption and refusal, holding open other possibilities of knowing and being in the world and enabling alternative political imaginaries. This paper seeks to outline an alternative mode of critique, one that places both relational and negative approaches under the scrutiny of an ‘abyssal’ approach. Here, after Fanon, the world violently forged into the global colour line is bifurcated via the construction of the modern subject, capable of reading itself as a subject in the world and through Human Geography as a field of study. In this always already antiblack world, the goal of ‘Abyssal Geography’ is not to continue worlding the modern subject in new ways, but to analyse and critique the mechanisms and shifts in critical thought through which Human Geography continues to salvage and to redeem the purchase of the modern subject and the world.

Towards living a better future: political vision and the humanistic conscience

Fromm’s theories can help the Left overcome its collective rejection of individualism and universalism, which limit socio-political possibility, offering Left solutions to these challenges and promoting alternate perspectives. His humanistic vision shares much with humanistic and positive psychology but differs in important respects. Centrally, Fromm’s notion of emancipation emphasises both individual and societal components. He believes independent and authentic relationships are a higher expression of human potential and bring true fulfilment. Fromm identifies a creative, non-alienated character orientation that includes a ‘humanistic conscience’. Comparing authoritarian and humanistic consciences, he emphasises human potential and social and individual interdependence. Personal development must also drive social change, and vice versa. Fromm’s perspective rejects zero-sum, either/or thinking about social change vis-à-vis individual flourishing. For him, both are important, and they are related. Following Fromm’s example, the Left should stress that individualistic societies cannot satisfy individual needs. Self-fulfilment requires fairness, community and shared personal experiences.

Algorithmic Dissent: Militarized Platforms and Palestinian Political Imagination in Jerusalem

This article provides an ethnographic account of how young Palestinian Jerusalemites responded to Israeli state surveillance during the summer and fall of 2021. Threading between interviews with social media influencers, long-time activists, and everyday users who broadcast the historic uprising on the internet, the author chronicles how these youth made use of digital platforms to draw unprecedented attention to settler violence in their city in spite of intrusive monitoring and censorship by Israeli authorities. Reviewing a long history of Israeli surveillance and extending ethnographic accounts of political cynicism in Palestine, the author argues that the suspicion many Palestinians exhibit toward social media platforms is an asset. Heightened awareness of how new technologies facilitated dragnet surveillance by Israeli authorities did not silence young Jerusalemites into acquiescence to a repressive status quo. Instead, it inspired them to speak out on their own terms, safeguarding their city while dramatizing the limits of surveillance.

From Mimeographs to Self-organization

Abstract This essay unpacks how Beijing-based workers’ handbills and posters during the 1989 democracy movement functioned as a counterinstitution that enabled everyday workers to translate economic demands into political self-organization through groups like the Workers’ Autonomous Federation. In contrast to liberal dissident writing at the time by the likes of Fang Lizhi and Liu Xiaobo, workers’ organizing strategies and political vision have seldom been analyzed. The author argues that these writings represent an important effort to create an inchoate civil society under authoritarian conditions, while going beyond these conditions by empowering workers to ground a broader struggle for democracy in reorganizing the control of society and productive industries through independent politics.

Normalizing and Mainstreaming the French Radical Right: Divergences in Leadership Communication during a Summer of Inland and Borderland Tensions

Abstract The radical right has become a central political force in most Western democracies. This process has been the result of the normalization and mainstreaming of its political leaders, discourses, and visions of society, notably involving the scapegoating of immigration and the use of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. However, the normalization and mainstreaming of radical right actors competing for the leadership of their overall political family remain an under-researched topic. The scope of the current article is to explore this phenomenon by considering the case of France, which after the United States, is the largest Western state that could potentially be ruled by a radical right president with extensive executive powers. The analysis shows that actors competing for the leadership of the radical right in a given country can generate diverging strategies of normalization and mainstreaming to secure their political distinction. Immigration and the Great Replacement constitute, respectively, a topic and a conspiracy theory that are emphasized and/or downplayed by opportunistic stakeholders weaving a web of interactions to define their comparative legitimacy and supremacy in the public sphere.

Peripheral activism: understanding the influence of California and Texas on the American Union

ABSTRACT A common conception of modern states is that central governments adopt and then enforce their desired laws on the entirety of their territory. The reverse, however, is also possible. That is, distant but prominent peripheries can influence the laws and functions of the entire territory. This article discusses the latter dynamic by considering the influence of California and Texas on US society. In the US, its member states can influence the centre vertically and horizontally. Vertical influence occurs when states directly influence the federal government – for California and Texas, this influence rests on their large number of federal representatives and their internal single party dominance. Horizontal influence occurs when states influence other states – that is, states can adopt successful laws already present in other states. A combination of the two can take place where states cooperate to then influence the centre. Together, these behaviours demonstrate peripheral activism, actions political sub-units take to stamp their preferred vision of society on their broader state. To supplement the discussion, I discuss the ideological divide between California and Texas and how they attempt to stamp their preferred vision of politics on the US.