Convoking the Radical Imagination: Games, Walks, SF and Other Participatory Methods for Commoning Research

Seminar summary

In their 2014 book The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish proposed that interventionist scholars should not only study and celebrate the radical imagination, they should also “convoke” it, calling together people and communities in struggle for provocative encounters that spark new thinking, feeling and modes of commoning. A decade later, Haiven reflects on these proposals with reference to a few projects he has since orchestrated. He has organized participatory walking tours of financial capitals to explore speculation and space with artists, scholars and activists; he has coordinated a science fiction writing workshop with rank-and-file Amazon workers to explore “The World After Amazon.” He uses podcasting as a platform for convivial co-research on themes including risk, anxiety, play and the the psychology of social movements. And he is currently exploring analog games and game-making as a model for cooperative research about politics, economics and culture, including the soon-to-be-published game Billionaires and Guillotines.

How to attend this seminar

This seminar will take place on Wednesday 6 November 2024 at 12pm.

We welcome you to join us in EBS.2.66 in the Essex Business School Building.

Unable to make it in person? This seminar will also be available to watch online.

It is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

Speaker bio

Max Haiven

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination. His most recent books are Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts (2020) and Art after Money, Money after Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization (2018). He is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Player and the Played: Gamification, Financialization and (anti-)Fascism and a board game, Billionaires and Guillotines. He led a team that recently published The World After Amazon: Stories from Amazon Workers (2024). Haiven is editor of VAGABONDS, a series of short, radical books from Pluto Press. He teaches at Lakehead University, where he directs the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). As part of Sense & Solidarity, he offers strategy and communications workshops for social movements.