Subterranean currents: Research and the radical imagination in the age of austerity

Abstract

Against a backdrop of austerity, securitization, and the rampant enclosure of public spaces and democratic processes including the university and scholarship, this article critically explores what prefigurative engaged research-research capable of not simply documenting what is but contributing to struggles for social justice and social change-might look like, what it can contribute, and what its limitations are. Beyond familiar calls for a "public" or "applied" social science and drawing on a two-year-long project focused on radical social movements and the radical imagination in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, this article explores what politicallyengaged social science research might offer to social justice struggles aiming to construct a more just, democratic, dignified, liberated, and peaceful world.