Valuing Difference With Radical Imagination

This paper investigates the concepts of hope, despair and the radical imagination, driven by the following questions: Can we exist beyond the binaries of hope and despair, two key concepts that drive educational practices? What is the radical imagination and what are the conditions for it to be put to work in educational spaces? First, education is explored as a hyperobject that is owned, imagined and practiced collectively. The semiotic square is introduced as a heuristic tool to illustrate the limitations of the binary opposition between hope and despair, and allows for an exploration of what is possible when these binaries are being set aside. The radical imagination then, is described as a collective practice that is radical in the sense that alternative social forms can always be imagined once we acknowledge that every social form is the result of the collective imagination. Finally, the paper explores conceptual as well as practical ideas that underpin Education for Uprising which is understood as the emergence of micro-political, autonomous spaces of direct action where community, solidarity and self-organization are key principles. Education for Uprising allows us to radically reimagine how we view education and to actively engage in alternative world-making.

This chapter explores the conceptual links between imagination and prefiguration. It argues that how and what societies imagine defines the horizon of what seems possible, and thus bears real consequences for our collective ability to act in the present. In this sense, imagination is an essential element of prefiguration and extends much further than the realm of society. The chapter contends that a prefigurative, radical imagination drives speculative capital and fictional expectations as they work tirelessly to produce future states that orientate economic, social and cultural values. In today’s financialized economies, capitalizing on imagined futures is capitalism’s own prefigurative act. Yet, while such dominant imaginings of the future serve to construct capitalism’s dystopias, the radical imagination also contains much-needed potential to create alternative visions. The chapter proposes a view of prefiguration that articulates the ‘radical’ in ‘imagination’ – a necessary step towards realizing the possibilities for articulating alternatives to today’s financialized economy and society.

(2007). Feminism and the radical imagination. Agenda: Vol. 21, Anniversary - Two Decades of African Feminist Publishing, pp. 18-31.

In our interconnected and interdependent world, national early childhood education and care (ECEC) policies can no longer be made or read independently from their global contexts. Policy statements often display a global awareness that construct notions about ‘the child’ as a ‘global citizen’, particular relations to others and certain prospects about the world. In this paper, we analyse the Australian Early Years Learning Framework: Belonging, Being and Becoming (EYLF) and associated documents to make explicit the particular child subjects, forms of belonging and prospects they produce. The multivocality and multiperspectivity of the EYLF enable parallel interpretations, which we utilise here and focus on two possible readings: first, an educational prospect that furthers neoliberal globalisation and modernist notions by fashioning ECEC as part of national and mostly economic projects, while the second reading identifies aspects of the EYLF that prefigure a new mode of learning that engages alternatively with our interdependent world through a ‘cosmopolitan ethics’ and ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’. Based upon our second reading, we utilise our ‘radical imagination’ to extend the cosmopolitan imaginary of the EYLF for pedagogical use.

(2001). Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. By Stephen Howard Browne. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1999; pp. ix + 201. $50.00 Hardcover, $24.95 Paper. Women's Studies in Communication: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 122-127.

Rethinking Prefiguration: Between Radical Imagination and Imaginal Politics

The impact of current trends in technology, digitalization and mass media on our global culture raises questions regarding the responsibility and ethics of research decisions in contemporary social and health sciences. Embedded in the dominant paradigms, these trends subtly affect our worldviews, our valuation of the human condition, and the nature of socio-political discourse. In such critical post normal times (SARDAR, 2009) radical imagination (HAIVEN & KHASNABISH, 2014) and epistemic activism, embracing non-dominant modes of knowledge production in the social and health sciences, becomes a necessity. Arts-based research (ABR) is resonant with the onto-epistemological perspectives and methodologies necessary to challenge and disrupt current unilateral and hegemonic paradigms underlying decaying societal and geo-political constructs. In this article, we advocate for the development of a global network of ABR scholars and stakeholders invoking a radical imaginative philosophy and arts-based research methodologies as an approach to social activism and epistemological change.

This essay explores a pilot drama class at the historic Eastlake Park Recreation Center. The fall 2019 residency was founded by Sleeveless Acts, a company that was born in 2017 with a mission to join communities to co-create theater with radical imagination. Eastlake Park is the center of African-American history in Phoenix, hosting legendary figures over the last century including Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, and George Washington Carver. Sleeveless Acts began an ongoing partnership with Eastlake Park with the project Celebration Eastlake, a site-specific theatrical performance devised with and for community members. This short case study explores Sleeveless Acts’s drama class and co-facilitation methodology as well as providing a window into the young people’s process of devising an original adaptation of “Little Red Riding Hood” called “Little Red and The Wolf.” This case study also includes reflections on co-teaching pedagogical practices, shedding light on the power of student-centered learning in drama and education.

While critical scholarship has extensively analyzed the governance of migration as a security issue and has documented its detrimental effects, the securitization of migration has become a successful mobilizing tool for far-right actors. Deeply worried by this development, this study moves beyond critique to explore how ordinary people imagine alternative security futures. Based on ten participatory workshops with 125 residents of Hamburg in 2023, our research examines how participants conceptualize a “secure city for all.” Participants envisioned security through enabling and preventative spaces and infrastructures rather than exclusionary measures: accessible urban spaces, affordable housing, community solidarity, and alternative emergency responses. The findings both confirm existing vernacular security scholarship, showing the fundamental ambivalence of security imaginations, and extend it in two key ways. First, we identify accessibility (physical, linguistic, and informational) as a previously overlooked dimension of vernacular security that affects diverse populations transversally. Second, we demonstrate that imagination constitutes a distinct form of vernacular security knowledge, highlighting how non-elites actively theorize alternative security arrangements. By creating spaces for collective imagination, the study shows how participatory methods can serve as political interventions in an era of shrinking democratic spaces.

The American School Counseling Association calls for professional school counselors to support the holistic development and success of all students. However, the field of school counseling is riddled with practices that have harmed and dehumanized Black students. For example, school counselors engage in practices (e.g., social–emotional learning and vocational guidance), which work to reinforce white supremacy and dehumanize Black students. Further, school counselors may also contribute to the ways that the basic and unique needs of Black students are overlooked, leading to the continued systemic adultification of Black students. What is needed is a radical imagination of school counseling, which centers on homeplace as the foundation in order to engage in freedom dreaming. In this article, the authors engage this radical imagination to detail an antiracist view of school counseling practice that embraces freedom dreaming and homeplace through healing and Indigenous educational practices, youth-led school counseling, and critical hip-hop practices to promote joy, creativity, power, love, resistance, and liberation.

Since the publication of his Prison Notebooks1 after World War II, the figure of Antonio Gramsci has loomed large in the radical imagination. Gramsci has been received, along with Georg Lukacs and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Karl Korsch, and especially Rosa Luxemburg – who might be understood as the mother of this tendency – as part of a broader effort to generate what has been termed an “open Marxism” against the doctrinaire theorists of the Second and Third Internationals who ossified historical materialism in deterministic formulae. Like Luxemburg and Korsch, Gramsci, a radicalized “traditional intellectual,” was an active participant both in the Socialist Party and in the formation of the Communist International and its Italian section. Like Luxemburg, Lukacs and Korsch among many others of his pedigree, as Socialist Party militant he joined Lenin in the call for revolutionary opposition to World War II, and eventually for the organization of a party of a “new type,” and finally for a break with the parties of the Second International. That is, in opposition to the growing reformist and electoralist trend of twentieth-century social democracy, Gramsci argued for a conception of political organization whose central precepts are to upend capitalism root and branch by any means necessary, including revolutionary action. Like Lenin he not only asserted, but developed a method for implementing the key role of professional intellectuals recruited, largely, from the ranks of the traditional intellectuals and the most advanced industrial workers. Yet, despite the fact that he, along with many others, were constrained to forge an anti-reformist alliance with Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin and other leaders of the Bolsheviks, his approach to questions of political strategy reflected an acute appreciation of what Korsch was later to call the “principle of historical specification” in forging a theory of social change, where specification refers to conditions of social time and social space, the particular aspects of national history, its economic aspects, but also the cultural, philosophical and political features that constitute the make-up of the nation.2 At the same time, Gramsci was an internationalist and never held to the Stalinist slogan of building “socialism in one country.” But he remained acutely attuned to the specificity of Italian history, its uneven economic and social development,and the forms of cultural production that corresponded to the struggle for Italian nationality, as opposed to its centuries of chronic regionalism.

Imagination is the power to make appear representations, whether with or without an external incitement. 'Impressions' are a philosophical or psychological artefact. Now philosophy starts when we begin trying to break the closure of this life-world in both its biological and social-historical dimensions. True, the Third Critique sketches another view, but only 'reflectively' and only as part of a heavy teleological metaphysics. Defunctionalization makes possible, first, the detachment of the representation from the object of the biological 'need', therefore the cathexis of biologically irrelevant objects. Then the possibility for the activities of the psyche to become objects for themselves, and the labile quid pro quo, which is the prerequisite of symbolism. Socialization is the process whereby the psyche is forced to abandon its pristine solipsistic meaning for the shared meanings provided by society. To elucidate the idea of the instituting social imaginary it can again follow the two paths: the philosophical and the psychoanalytical.

Background: In the wake of COVID-19 and protests against racial violence, scholars of education, alongside educational organizations, called for innovative responses to address racial injustice, but one solution was consistently mentioned across educational spaces: the need for educators to reimagine education in a postpandemic/endemic world. And yet, even though the importance of (re)imagination in deterring educational issues was greatly emphasized in academia and popular culture, scholarship detailing ways to activate teachers’ imaginations was limited. Purpose: Considering the role of imagination and creativity in the fight for racial justice, the purpose of this article is to examine how arts-based pedagogies in the teacher education classroom might provide space for preservice teachers to cultivate their imaginative proclivities toward racial justice. Research Design: To engage in this analysis, the author employs a thematic analytic process undergirded by the concept of activist art pedagogy and supported by a conceptual framework that bridges abolitionist teaching and the Archaeology of Self. The combination of the framework and analytic method was used to analyze visual artifacts and meta-reflections created by preservice teachers who constructed multiple aesthetic responses to class readings. Conclusions or Recommendations: Findings suggest that critical arts-based inquiries helped preservice teachers to personally connect to and question the historical roots of racial justice. Further, findings indicate that arts-based inquiries can engage preservice teachers’ creative proclivities toward a reimagination of their roles and responsibilities as racial justice–informed teachers.

As scholars increasingly reconsider the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Courtney Thorsson's Women's Work stands at the cutting edge of scholarship that assesses the legacy of that movement for black women writers. Thorsson theorizes a strand of contemporary African American women's novels that “reclaim and revise cultural nationalism” (1) as a literary discourse and everyday practice. Through meticulous, original readings of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters (1980), Ntozake Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982), Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988), and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997), Thorsson argues that these “novels of the cultural nationalist revision” (4, 12) theorize a cultural nationalism that depends upon “shared longing and radical imagining” (12) as performed through practices of organizing, cooking, dancing, mapping, and inscribing. “Women's work” names the fictional activities through which characters imagine a “sovereign homeland in spaces as local as the kitchen and as broad as the planet” (24) as well as the writers' own “textual-social struggle to envision alternative communities” (1). These works dismantle divisions between the theory and practice of nation to offer an expansive vision of post–Black Power collectivity.The black women writers Thorsson examines sustain “the black arts tenet that literature should do work in the world,” but they also “expand the genre, gender, and geography of [the Black Arts Movement] and break with its realist bent” (173). That is, whereas the Black Arts Movement “privileged poetry and drama,” these writers choose the novel (5). Their fiction re-centers “the public and private work of ordinary women” often marginalized by Black Arts (3). And they expand Black Arts geography by defining nation as practiced through “daily, local labor informed by many routes of identification” (10). Scholars such as James Smethurst and Margo Crawford are expanding our sense of the “limited geography” (8) and “realist bent” (173) of Black Arts, thus revealing more of the “startling variety” that Thorsson states is “a less noted legacy of the black arts movement” (19). But whether we wish to distinguish black women novelists' imaginative and expansive works from those of Black Arts writers or we do not, Thorsson beautifully illuminates the work that her writers use the novel to do. Exploiting the novel's traditional role in nation formation but unmooring it from the nation-state (6, 115), these novelists practice nation as Brent Edwards's writers practice diaspora (28): by imagining portable, mutable, diverse black communities bound more by what Ralph Ellison called “an identity of passions” than by a shared place (qtd. in Thorsson 12).Thorsson uses the term nation to describe these imagined communities because her writers themselves do so (3)—as when Paule Marshall states, “Black people in this country [the United States] really do constitute a nation apart” (90). Thorsson uses the term cultural nationalism “to both articulate an African American nation that is distinct from the nation-state and to place these authors in a . . . tradition” of African American letters stretching from Phillis Wheatley to Black Arts writers (3). The cultural nation envisioned here is not without dissent or tension, but it is cohesive. Hence contemporary black women writers “perform just the complicated negotiation of identity that [Paul] Gilroy imagines, but do so through identification with the cultural nation that he would discard” (176). Their work “demand[s] that scholars address the continued relevance of nation in post-black arts writing” (1).Thorsson's study extends the work of Madhu Dubey and Houston Baker in addition to that of Gilroy and Edwards. Whereas Dubey concludes Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (1994) by invoking the “tense dialogue between black nationalist discourse and black women's fiction in the 1970s” and its legacy for “black women's fiction in the 1980s” (qtd. in Thorsson 15), Thorsson picks up the thread by showing how black women writers “incorporate the multivalent and thick subjectivity of 1970s women's novels” into their vision of cultural nationhood in the 1980s and 1990s (16). Whereas Baker's Workings of the Spirit (1991) seems to “celebrat[e] a vague ‘Afro-American women's expressive production’ rooted in romanticized southern folkways,” Thorsson insists that women novelists are not “transmitting vague, gendered wisdom” but rather performing the “specific, embodied, detailed practice of an African American cultural nation” (30–31). Even the links between nation and “spiritual knowledge” that are so important to all of these novels manifest as practices (28). Indeed, Thorsson's use of the term practice is in part designed “to suggest the connotative meaning of practice as conjure or second sight” (ibid.).Women's Work begins with Bambara's 1970 anthology The Black Woman. This text is a key precursor to novels of the cultural nationalist revision not only because it offers a feminist revision of Black Arts but also because Bambara's “preface frames the volume as defined ‘by practice’” (19) and makes “the black woman . . . a multivalent, shifting, complex term” (20). Thorsson links Bambara's editorial organization of that anthology to the narrative organization of her prismatic novel The Salt Eaters in chapter 1. Here Thorsson shows that Bambara organizes the fragmented narrative around the healing of activist Velma Henry to create “a chorus of voices, coalitions, and modes of knowledge that come to function as a complex, multifocal healing system” (51)—a nation defined by “generative dissonance” (59).Thorsson's following chapter on Shange's Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo highlights the practice of cooking, showing how “recipes in particular celebrate women's bodies, invite participation, pass on personal and familial history, and make imagined travel possible” (65). Chapter 3 examines scenes of dance in Praisesong for the Widow. Following protagonist Avey Johnson from a Brooklyn living room to the South Carolina sea island of Tatem to the Caribbean island of Carriacou, Thorsson shows how the character “sifts through her individual and collective past” and ultimately dances as a performance of a complex “diasporic consciousness” (110). She analyzes Naylor's Mama Day in chapter 4, arguing that Naylor does not figure the South as “a site of nostalgia or literal return” but rather as “a portable homeland” “defined more by culture (foods, ‘codes of behavior,’ speech, and upbringing) than by geography” (121).Thorsson's readings refuse to idealize the nation as a harmonious sisterhood; she notes the homophobia (14) and class privilege (127) that threaten coalitions. But neither does she romanticize “diversity within unity,” a fragile calculus in which the former might always undo the latter. She writes, “As the twentieth century draws to a close . . . , diversity and dissent threaten to dismantle collectivity . . . ” (138–39). The generative counterpoint Thorsson locates in The Black Woman becomes cacophonous division in her rather surprising final chapter on Morrison's Paradise.Paradise is set in 1976, a year when “anxious affirmations of Americanness at a moment of deep disillusion among African Americans [mark a deep] disconnect between the nation-state and its African American residents” (144). As Morrison states in a 1986 interview, “Suppose everything turns out just fine? And in five years or ten years, boom, integration, whatever this moment was about happened and we all lived happily ever after? I said nobody's gonna get away with that; they're not gonna tell me it was that easy . . . Like, it was not easy being a black girl in 1940. . . . Before you erase this, wait” (qtd. in Thorsson 144). According to Thorsson, Morrison writes these “forgotten” histories into Paradise in the form of barely legible inscriptions (ibid.). Although it is not entirely clear whether inscription is meant to “restore multiplicity” to community (170) or fragment it by “refus[ing] the reader and characters any safe home” (163), the archive that Thorsson unearths here is remarkable. Her archival research itself refuses to “erase” the Toni Morrison who once spoke so forthrightly—and not only about the fact that “it was not easy being a black girl in 1940” but also about the fact that it was not easy being a black woman in 1970. As she recalls in the same interview, “There was a lot of macho stuff in that [Black Power] movement. . . . There was a heavy weight of men with dicks. . . . The earnest desperation for proof of maleness, proof of manhood for black men, was at the heart of that movement” (151). Such moments offer a crucial glimpse of the candor that Morrison's stylization as the stately queen of American letters would soon suppress.Thorsson seldom calls attention to such brilliant critical moves, often deferring to her novelists as “serious literary scholars” in their own right (4). She rightly notes that most of her authors “hold graduate degrees” and write literary criticism and give interviews through which they theorize their own work (4, 30). However, the unique literary critical work Thorsson herself does warrants attention. First, one of her major contributions is to identify this strand of African American literary production as such. At this moment, she writes, “there is room to identify specific strands and trends within contemporary African American literature,” far beyond noting “books that are contemporary narratives of slavery and books that are not” (178). Her aesthetic history of this particular strand offers a model for subsequent literary critical studies—as does her refreshing commitment to the literary despite the move toward interdisciplinarity and her sustained attention (following her writers) to the nation amid “the current move toward global, diasporic, and transnational perspectives in the humanities” (175).Above all, Women's Work is among the best demonstrations I know of the idea that literature can “do work in the world.” We understand this—or kind of understand it, when we are not questioning the social efficacy of studying literature—but the way Thorsson makes this case is powerful. On one level, she follows in the footsteps of black feminist literary critics such as Valerie Smith and Deborah McDowell who dismantle divides between fiction and theory (188); she does so not only by arguing that novels produce theory but also by granting Ellison's and Morrison's commentaries about the novel as much weight as Franco Moretti's. But Thorsson also destabilizes boundaries between art and life; she does this through her own subtle practice of what I would term “critical conjure.”She explicitly and inventively reads “the work of writing novels in conversation with the fictional women's work in the novels” (9). For instance, The Salt Eaters ends with an evocation of a new future in which “another script could play itself out.” Thorsson writes, “It is up to the novelists writing in the wake of this healing to inhabit this space [at the end of the novel] to write ‘another script’ for an African American cultural nation. Bambara prepares this ground” (63). Shange's Indigo embodies “the many modes of knowledge Bambara calls for in The Salt Eaters” and “is the nationalist culture worker [Bambara's protagonist] plans to be” (79). Thorsson's formulations give characters a life of their own: Avey Johnson “gets a book-length praisesong because she does the work of traveling . . . toward African American collectivity” (25). Refusing the disenchantment and skepticism betrayed by critical keywords like “problematic,” Thorsson's rhetorical conjure brilliantly bears out Bambara's claim that writing is “a perfectly legitimate way to participate in struggle” (4). We need not imagine the work of nation to be out there somewhere else: the work of creating and responding to these fictional worlds is the work.

This article considers places where climate change-induced hazards will be particularly important, focusing on two examples, the lagoon location of Venice and the Garonne riverbank location of Bordeaux. The Venice lagoon territory is close to the coast and has a dispersed form of urban development. Our project experiments resulted in the formulation of a series of adaptation strategies to increased disaster risks, including returning current agricultural land and residential areas to their original state as wetlands and marshes before their reclamation during the early decades of the twentieth century. The scenarios introduce space as a relevant variable into the debate about the impact of climate change and adaptation. This article also deals with the recovery of “bad places,” such as the urban blight on the Garonne riverbanks of Bordeaux, and their relationship with sustainability and disaster risks. Increasingly, the emphasis on minimizing energy consumption and promoting recycling forces cities to reuse places of elevated risk. Only very recently in modern urban planning are polluted and risky areas frequently selected for new development projects to reclaim the vast areas of existing brownfields in the name of sustainability. Integrating disaster risk reduction into a new economic and social context has thus become an extremely important part of contemporary urban design and planning for these reclaimed (bad) areas. The research concludes that urban and territorial design should and can integrate the inevitability of risk. This is necessary for developing approaches and strategies that offer some rethinking about “wicked” problems, long-term time horizons, radical imagination, dynamic representations, and minute territorial readings in contemporary urban planning.