Traversing fantasies, activating desires : economic geography, activist research, and psychoanalytic methodology

In this article I recount the ways that key concepts in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory-the relationship between language and desire, fantasy and subject formation, ethics and the traversal of fantasy-have enabled a novel methodological approach to activist research. Psychoanalysis allows us to recast research as a process of encountering and traversing fantasies, which is simultaneously a process of engendering new representations, desires, subjectivities, and societies