Subterranean Currents: Research and the Radical Imagination in the Age of Austerity

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 politically-engaged social science research might offer to social justice struggles aiming to construct a more just, democratic, dignified, liberated, and peaceful world