Annual Anthropology Lecture March 27 – “Escape Velocities: Movements, Research, and the Radical Imagination” – Dr. Alex Khasnabish

Against the backdrop of the “slow-motion apocalypse” of spiraling eco-social crisis, recent years have borne witness to increasingly militant waves of popular rebellion on a global scale.

Instead of understanding such eruptions merely as protest or a conventional game of power politics played by other means, what would it mean to attend to the rarely simple or straightforward ways that movements – particularly those struggling for radical social justice – operate as engines of social change and incubators of socio-political possibility?

Dr. Alex Khasnabish, Mount Saint Vincent University, will share his research on social movements and social change at this year’s Annual Anthropology Lecture on Thursday, March 27th at 7:15 pm in Brian Mulroney Hall, Room 101.

In his lecture, “Escape Velocities: Movements, Research, and the Radical Imagination,” Khasnabish will critically discuss the way we understand social change, social movement “success” and “failure,” and the role and value of engaged research.

“I’m interested in the relationship between the radical imagination, radical social justice struggles, and solidarity research which I explore by drawing on a decade of research with radical social justice activists across North America,” said Khasnabish.

“Ultimately I argue for the humble utility of research that seeks not merely to observe but convoke the radical imagination in the midst of social movements struggling to re-make themselves and their worlds.”

Khasnabish is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University and co-director of the Radical Imagination Project (www.radicalimagination.org). His work focuses on radical social movements, the radical imagination, globalization, and social change.

He is the author of Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global (Zed Books) and Zapatismo Beyond Borders (University of Toronto Press), co-editor (with Jeffrey Juris) of Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political (Duke University Press), and co-author (with Max Haiven) of The Radical Imagination (forthcoming 2014, Zed Books).