Radical Imagination Research Articles

The Everyday and the Evental Public Space: Rethinking the Spatiotemporal Modalities of Radical Political Events

AbstractIn this paper, we put forward an examination of the interconnections between public space, the everyday, and the event in order to rethink the spatiotemporal modalities of political action. Recent mass mobilisations and civil unrest events around the globe have brought to the fore the complex relationship between political practices and public space. These indicate a critique of representative democracy, authoritarian governance, and precarious living conditions, as well as entailing new ways of doing and conceptualising politics. Our paper approaches the production and (re)configuration of public space through a spatiotemporal analysis of collective action based on the events that took place in Athens, in December 2008, and in Tottenham, London, in August 2011. By considering the everyday socio‐political dynamics of public space as formative of radical political practices, we also pay attention to its evental (re)production. Such a process, we argue, entails the potentiality for rupture, contestation and radical imagination.

Cities of Fruit: Arts Intervention and the Radical Imagination

Cities of Fruit: Arts Intervention and the Radical Imagination

Dreaming Up Well Futures: Social Movements and Public Health

While much of public health history has focused on transformations stemming from biomedical discoveries, the role of social movements in public health transformation is often overlooked. Both the Black Power and Civil Rights Movements organized for better access to care and more quality healthcare for Black populations as well as other marginalized groups. It has been noted that social movements like these, that work toward social justice, are associated with improved population health. In exploring the Black Power Movement, through analysis primarily of the work of the Black Panther Party (BPP), I come to question and reflect on how a tradition and practice of radical imagination underpins the ability of social movements to be such powerful vehicles for transforming public health. And in turn, how this critical imagining must shape my own positionality and future work as a public health practitioner and physician dedicated to health, justice, and self-determination for all marginalized peoples.

"[This] system was not made for [you]:" A case for decolonial Scientia.

Sylvia Wynter's "recoded" form of science called decolonial Scientia (DS) is grounded in an understanding of humans as simultaneously biological and cultural. DS includes narrative interventions that destabilize Western scientific authority, and address limitations that empirical data collection and analysis place on capturing simultaneous realities. Therefore, Wynter's narrative "languaging" is both scientific critique and grounded in a tradition of Black radical imagining. In this article, I use languaging to destabilize the canonical narrative tied to W. M. Cobb's production of the article "Race and Runners." The standard telling focuses on Cobb's examination of Owens' lower extremities to expose the fallacy of racial differences in athletic ability. Destabilization of the narrative allows for identifying relational complexities between actors involved in the canonical story - and identifying ideologies embedded within it that guide our deconstructions of biological race. My alter(ed)native subjectivity informs my use of languaging to argue that the relationship between narrative and research practices belie Western scientific/unscientific binaries. Audiovisual and documentary sources of the public-facing "Race and Runners" story were subject to comparative analysis to verify the content and order of events in the canonical narrative. Letters focused on race and athletic ability obtained from the W. Montague Cobb Manuscript Collection at Howard University serve as "apocryphal" sources of information. Correspondence between Cobb and a representative member of the public named Howard Duncan took place within a period immediately before, during and after Cobb publishes "Race and Runners" in the Journal of Health and Physical Education. Contents were subject to a systematic analysis that involved reviewing documents to identify statements reflecting scientific practices, human interactions and relationships between race and athletic ability reflected in the canonical narrative. Contents were also examined for statements relevant to the narrative that departed from or added to the canonical story in the same three areas. Details regarding departures and additions were recorded along with the specific part of the narrative to which they corresponded. Narrative departures and additions were articulated with the canonical narrative in the interest of destabilizing it to identify "knots of ideas, histories and narratives that, contrary to Western science, can only be legible in relation to one another" (McKittrick, 2015b p. 2). Letters exchanged between Cobb and Duncan reveal dynamics that are obscured in the canonical storyline. For instance, Duncan's ability as a white male to assert himself as Cobb's peer demonstrates how racialized power is enacted through science. This is also reflected in Owens' position in the narrative as a voiceless object of knowledge. Letters also present Cobb's identity beyond being a "pioneer," rendering how he is studying and experiencing racism. This includes how he refuses to engage Duncan as a peer. More than mere stories, narratives are motivating and instructive forces that shape how we study human biology and use our research to oppose biological notions of race. Correspondence between Cobb and Duncan reveals how Western scientific ideologies that reinforce prescribed roles and boundaries are embedded in narratives. These ideologies can limit the transformative potential of our approaches to contesting biological notions of race.

Adapting to change, welcoming otherness

Adapting to change, welcoming otherness

Integrating Crip Theory and Disability Justice into Feminist Anti-Violence Education


 
 
 In this paper, I critically reflect on my efforts to and experiences of integrating disability justice and crip theory into my intersectional, queer, feminist pedagogy. I begin by grounding my pedagogical practice in my experiences as an anti-violence advocate / activist in order to argue that disability theory and justice have the potential to not only expand anti-violence education, but also to transform it through careful attention to access, care, and interdependence. In this article, access refers to the possibilities of being fully present and supported within a given learning space; care describes the process of creating access through actions that make presence possible; and interdependence recognizes that access and care must co-exist because people need each other. I then identify parallels between anti-violence work and theories and movements against ableism because I have found this intersection to be pedagogically generative. Next, I describe what disability theory and justice, access, and crip politics (McRuer, 2006; Price, 2015) look like within the context of anti-violence education. In the second section of this paper, I write about how disability theory and justice brought to bear on anti-violence education can help to promote radical imagination and hope as well as deeper understandings of foundational concepts like consent. I also critically examine how anti-violence education can expand the possibilities of disability pedagogy through meaningful engagements with intersectional feminist theory and praxis. My purpose in developing these claims is to demonstrate the ongoing importance of bridging disability theory and justice with intersectional feminist practices of education.
 
 

Collective Visioning: Igniting the Radical Imagination

As the spaces which once existed within the university for the co-imagining of liberatory political praxes diminish, social movements are increasingly reverting to methods of collective visioning which have been developed on the streets to theorise radical social change. I argue that such methodologies provide important opportunities for a reappraisal of our hierarchical student/teacher relations, and make the case that we can collectively learn much more from within our movements than anyone might hope to teach us from outside. The article traces our current movement wave, and locates contemporary forms of collective visioning within a wider lineage of knowledge co-production in social movements. The neoliberal subversion of university education is examined, and proposals made for ways in which we might challenge these hegemonic conditions. I conclude that the liberatory epistemologies and forms of knowledge co-production explored in this article offer significant potential for developing new modes of praxis for our current wave of ecological and anti-capitalist activists both inside and outside the university.

A Call for Radical Imagining: Exploring Anti-Blackness in the Music Therapy Profession

This spotlight presentation explores the relationship between anti-Black violence and music therapy. Centering the recent deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Sean Reed, George Floyd, and Tony McDade, the speaker discusses protests taking place in the United States and throughout the world that demand justice for Black lives. In this presentation, the speaker discusses the interconnectedness of physical and social death as a continuum of oppression the field must contend with to meet social justice aims. Music therapy across the globe is situated within complex socio-political, socio-structural, socio-historical, and socio-cultural systems. It holds the vestiges of White European settler colonialism and is founded upon dominant cultural values and ideals that support its existence and simultaneously benefit and harm client communities. While, as a professional body, we aim to deepen music therapy access and conceptualize empowerment from a social justice frame, we must explore the various ways music therapy leverages proximations of power. Any calls for access and empowerment in music therapy amplify our existence within unjust systems and our participation in their perpetuation in education, theory, research, practice, and praxis. The speaker explores anti-Blackness from a Black feminist lens and discusses the radical repositioning of music therapy as we collectively strive to meet social justice aims.

Reality, Determination, Imagination

Abstract In contemporary debates, the realist position (here speculative realism/materialism is of particular interest) not only implies a belief in what is real, but also allows us to ascertain a certain possibility of accessing reality, thus bringing about the question of correlation as it pertains to determination and subordination. This article borrows from Cornelius Castoriadis’ arguments regarding Georg Cantor’s set theory to criticize the primacy of mathematics in Quentin Meillassoux’s thinking. At the same time, it argues that there are three regimes of correlation. The first two senses of correlation imply determining subordination, whereas the third one invokes a new understanding of correlation: being is always related to the subject, but is never determined or subordinated by it. In this light, Castoriadis’s notion of radical imagination aims to maintain an emancipatory meaning – the call for an anamorphic procedure of change in perspective, to the gestures of constant re-determination, without any pretense to totality.

The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination

This is a book review of The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination by Greg Burris.

Destabilizing the boundaries of the techno/human: the fluxable cyborg in Rosa Montero’s Lágrimas en la lluvia

ABSTRACT In “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway (2006. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late twentieth Century.” In The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, edited by Joel Weiss, Jason Nolan, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Peter Trifonas, 117–158. New York: Springer) set forth the cyborg as figure that could symbolize a move beyond the binaries and categorizations that have defined feminist identity politics, toward hybridities that exist along a continuum of organic-inorganic, fiction-reality, nature-culture. In the concrete manifestations of the cyborg and the cyborg body in science fiction, however, this has not been the case, with gender binaries reinscribed more often than challenged. In the case of the female cyborg, these characters find inclusion in many science fiction narratives only as fetishistic caricatures or are infantilized, existing only as manifestations of their use value, existing to satisfy the sexual needs of human men rather than as fully realized beings. However, Bruna Husky of Rosa Montero’s eponymous trilogy – comprising Lágrimas en la lluvia, El peso del corazón and Los tiempos del odio – breaks this restrictive mold. This essay proposes that through Bruna in Lágrimas en la lluvia, Montero destabilizes masculinist gendered conceptions and performativity of the female cyborg body that permeate science fiction. Bruna demonstrates what Ramzi Fawaz (2016. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press) calls “fluxability”, that is, a state of continual material and psychic becoming rather than being, capable of going beyond binaries and negotiating multiple, contradictory identities and/or affiliations. Furthermore, in Bruna’s interactions with human and nonhuman life, Montero highlights how the limits of humanity–inhumanity become blurred, porous and highly relational in the posthuman reality of the future world she depicts.

인종 멜로드라마의 급진적 상상력: 폴린 홉킨스의 『한 핏줄, 혹은 숨겨진 자아』에 나타난 뮬라토 형제애적 시민사회

This paper explores the political imagination in Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self (1902-1903). During the time that she wrote, the contrived delusions of racial purity provoke racial hysteria and the fear of racial passing. Hopkins converts this racial fantasy to arguing that all white and black in America are “of one blood.” Despite the taboo of miscegenation, Hopkins proposes the alternative polity and the citizen identity based on the hybridity of Mulatto/a. Hopkins encodes the public and political concerns in the very form of melodrama. Conflicts between virtue and vice in Of One Blood are separated from the racial legibility and become the psychological, historical, political issues, which negotiate the social tensions in post-Reconstruction years. The desire for transforming the political model of white supremacy is alluded to the family romance of replacing white paternal authority. With a new model of the mulatto/a fraternity, Of One Blood implies Hopkins’ radical imagination on political equality and the racial uplift in the Jim Crow era.

Introduction

Work for reparations requires interventions by world historians to bear witness to the brutalities of the past as part of a process that seeks truth and reconciliation, along with some measure of accountability and restitution. Shifting our lens to encompass world history exposes the varied effects of slavery and the slave trade, and it allows us to interrogate national boundaries and hegemonic histories. It also makes visible the myriad forms of resistance to the capitalist world-system, nurturing the radical imagination of alternatives. We discuss work in the United Nations and other global political spaces to advance demands for reparations and introduce contributions to this symposium.

Tove Jansson's Genius: The radical imagination that built the visionary world of the Moomins

The Yale ReviewVolume 108, Issue 2 p. 192-201 REVIEW Tove Jansson's Genius: The radical imagination that built the visionary world of the Moomins Evan James, Author of Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe: A Novel and I've Been Wrong Before: Essays.Search for more papers by this author Evan James, Author of Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe: A Novel and I've Been Wrong Before: Essays.Search for more papers by this author First published: 07 July 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/yrev.13648AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume108, Issue2Summer 2020Pages 192-201 RelatedInformation

Spatializing Radical Political Imaginaries

This article seeks to make sense of why participants in square occupations point to the transformative character of their experience. Drawing from narrative research on the 2011 occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, I argue that the transformative quality of the occupation lies in the spatialized emergence and practice of radical political imaginaries in these encampments, which signify a demarcation from and an alternative to the neoliberalizing of everyday life in Greece. By scrutinizing the spatial demarcation between the “upper” and “lower” parts of the Syntagma Square occupation, one can think more carefully about the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the radical imagination.

Beyond the critical: reinventing the radical imagination in transformative development and global(ization) studies

ABSTRACT Evidence is mounting of severe planetary and civilizational crises, interrelated and mutually constitutive of one another at unprecedented scales caused by the ‘globalization' of a hegemonic mode of civilizational ‘(mal-)development.' Critical scholarship in both Development and Global(ization) Studies faces numerous challenges. In this article, we argue that critical scholarship needs to be radically transformed to become radically transformative. This means that we need to critically revisit what identifies both fields as “critical”, at the meta-theoretical level, as a joint transformative project, fundamentally independent of capital’s discursive lexicons and historical logics. An ontological recognition of the truth and a new dialectic of the truth and the real help enact an action-oriented agenda to explore the potentials for liberation. It is now time to bravely explore the realm of impossibility by re/imagineering alternative lifeways beyond capital, beyond fossil fuel, and beyond commodity-oriented cumulative growth and their associated narrow rationalities.

“More than Equivalent to a Year of College”: Hubert Harrison and Informal Education in Harlem's New Negro Movement

Background/Context Spurred on by the mass migration of African Americans from the South and blacks from the Caribbean, Harlem by the 1920s was defined by its association with New Negro culture and was widely known as the “mecca” of black life. The New Negro movement, as the period was called by contemporaries, has become a focus of scholars interested in black radical politics. Still, there has yet to be a focused study of the underlying educational experiences that helped create the New Negro movement and the mass political awakening that accompanied it. Focus of Study This paper takes as its focus Hubert Harrison, an Afro-Caribbean immigrant who arrived in New York City at the dawn of the New Negro movement and became a leading public intellectual and educator of the movement. In particular, it focuses on Harrison's participation and influence in several dimensions of the network of informal education that emerged as a part of Harlem life in the first part of the 20th century: street oratory, educational forums, and the black press. After a brief overview of Harrison and his political development, I examine each educational practice, discussing both Harrison's contribution and the wider culture of radical education he helped to create. I argue that at the foundation of the New Negro movement—and the burgeoning political consciousness among inhabitants of the uptown neighborhood in New York—was a system of education unlike anything that could be found inside a classroom. It was dynamic, democratic, and for many black residents moving into Harlem, inspirational. Research Design This paper uses archival materials from Hubert Harrison's papers at Columbia University. Those include newspaper clippings, diary entries, and pamphlets for talks and courses, among other material. It also draws upon newspapers and reports from the period as well as secondary literature on the topic. Conclusions/Recommendations While education scholars have often grappled with the limits of school as a mechanism for changing society, the history of Harrison and informal education in Harlem reveals the importance of political education outside the classroom in creating and sustaining social movements. For Harrison and the Harlemites of the 1920s, street oratory, educational forums, and a radical black press served as essential mechanisms for broadening what historian Robin D. G. Kelley has called the “black radical imagination.” Yet the educative experience of blacks arriving in Harlem is not so different from the experience of others who have participated in social movements in the 20th and 21st centuries. The challenge for scholars is not to identify and study political movements that can be linked to various forms of schooling, but to identify the educative dimensions of social uprising that take place beyond the walls of the classroom.

Polyglot Internationalism and the Matriarchive: The Case of Keorapetse Kgositsile

In this essay, I make a case for oral traditions passed on from matrilineal members of the family to their (grand)children as a key system of knowledge that has informed and shaped black intellectual culture and the black radical imagination in South Africa and its transnational iterations. I focus on the work of Keorapetse Kgositsile, who attributes his cultural and political consciousness to his grandmother and mother, and asserts that they equipped him with the wisdom to survive the hostile environment of colonial modernity and apartheid. I put forth questions about a gendered black radical tradition and the place of these (grand)mothers in it. I adopt the heuristic matriarchive, which holds together locally specific matrilineally inherited worldviews, intersubjective relations, vernaculars, and aesthetics. I show how these have shaped pan-African sensibilities in this towering figure of South African modernity. When we consider the manner in which this prominent figure of black intellectual culture carries with him what I call the matriarchive to inform his work and politics in his itinerancy in the black diaspora, we open possibilities to investigate how the matriarchive was brought into locution with transatlantic cultural and political production. The issue of transnationalism and vernaculars serves to illuminate the mutations and transformations of the matriarchive in his work, which has enriched a polyglot internationalism. I argue that his work, shaped by a distinct sense of custom, culture, and community, has transformed his interlocutors in the black diaspora.

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

ABSTRACTThis 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.

“What do we wanna be?” Black radical imagination and the ends of the world

ABSTRACTBuilding off the work of Frantz Fanon, this essay calls for a Fanonian approach to communication studies. What a Fanonian approach provides is a twofold critique of the potentiality of mutual recognition—a concept central to many communication studies of race: first, Fanon illustrated that the self/Other is inseparable from a raced conception of the world; second, he showed that people of color have historically remade conceptions of humanness outside Western terms. Both can be utilized to point toward new ways of theorizing for the field.