Book review: the radical imagination: social movement research in the age of austerity by Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish

• Main Author: Gilbert, Paul
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: London School of Economics and Political Science 2014
• Subjects: BF Psychology; H Social Sciences (General); JC Political theory; Perseverance; North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/74098/; http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/74098/1/blogs.lse.ac.uk-Book%20Review%20The%20Radical%20Imagination%20Social%20Movement%20Research%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Austerity%20by%20Max%20Haiven%20an.pdf; http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/

What is to be done in the face of crisis, when the very trope of crisis curtails our ability to imagine what might be possible, beyond a narrow horizon of diminished expectations? Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish confront a ‘crisis of social reproduction’ shaped by the crash of 2008 and the war on terror. They find the imagination hobbled, tethered to individualized dreams of enrichment or escape from precarity. What seems to be missing from North Atlantic social movements – and society at large – is The Radical Imagination, a process of collectively envisioning alternative futures based on analyses of the root causes of social problems. Committed social researchers are tasked with ‘opening the time for the imagination’ in the landscape of perseverance that is populated by social movements caught between success and failure, writes Paul Gilbert.