Journal Articles

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https://hdl.handle.net/10587/1329
Journal articles authored by Dr. Alex Khasnabish.

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    Convoking the Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research, Dialogic Methodologies and Scholarly Vocations
    (2012) Khasnabish, Alex; Haiven, Max
    This article reflects critically on “The Radial Imagination: A Research Project About Movements, Social Change, and the Future,” an engaged social movement research project conducted with self-identified “radical” activists in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. In so doing, the authors explore a research strategy that seeks not merely to observe the radical imagination—the ability to envision and work toward better futures—but to convoke it: to mobilize the singular location of academic inquiry to create a research environment within which the radical imagination can be better understood. Through a critical examination of the project’s theoretical architecture and methodological framework the authors investigate the promises, possibilities, and difficulties implicated in critical social movement research carried out through a strategy of convocation, contrasting it with more conventional approaches to social movement research.
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    Between Success and Failure: Dwelling with Social Movements in the Hiatus
    (2013) Khasnabish, Alex; Haiven, Max
    This article explores the ways social movement “successes” and “failures” are conceived of and measured, particularly in relation to research that strives to act in solidarity with such movements . Reviewing some of the best examples of politically - engaged research , we contend that even these assume normative categories of “success” and “failure” with respect to both move ment and research outcomes. Drawing on o ur work in the Radical Imagination Project, a politically - e ngaged social movement research project in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, we argue that social movements typically dwell not at the poles of the success/failure binary but in the “hiatus” between “not - success” and “not - failure.” We contend that a more dynamic mapping of social movement success an d failure produces a richer and more robust und erstanding of social movements, the significance of their activity, and social change. This reconceptualization and remapping of success and failure also has important implications for the way researchers seek ing to work in solidarity with social movements can productively reimagine their own measures of succes s and failure .
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    “They Are Our Brothers and Sisters”: Why Zapatismo Matters to Independent Labour in Mexico.
    (2005) Khasnabish, Alex
    In this paper I seek to illuminate the bases upon which the Mexican independent labour movement and the indigenous Zapatista movement have been able to engage in a politics of accompaniment, a politics based on mutual respect and support without sacrificing autonomy or difference. I examine how this intersection emerged, the grounds that make it possible, and the significance of such an intersection for the Zapatistas and independent labour. This analysis is also an attempt to explore political relationships and possibilities that transgress traditionally understood boundaries and to begin to imagine new relationships and ways of envisioning and practicing politics.
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    An Echo That Reechoes: Transnational Activism and the Resonance of Zapatismo
    (2006) Khasnabish, Alex
    In this paper I examine the resonance of Zapatismo amongst political activists in Canada and the United States. Specifically, I look at how and why activists in Canada and the US have been galvanized by the Zapatista struggle and how it shapes their own political practices and struggles within contexts far removed from Chiapas, Mexico. Rather than signaling the birth of a new internationalism, I argue that the intersection of Zapatismo with diverse communities of North American activists has yielded unanticipated and even powerful results, many of which are predicated on a new kind of political imagination. Often explicitly, these political projects aim at articulating various forms of “autonomy” and interconnectedness in relation to the new neoliberal world order by melding novel political, aesthetic, and cultural approaches to activism, a melding which speaks to the deep and complex impact of Zapatismo upon the search for new political spaces and practices.