What does it mean to do research with rather than for or about radical social justice movements? What are the possibilities and limitations of academically-based research that strives to work with movements and convoke the radical imagination? What are the ethical, methodological, and political issues that arise through such a practice and how might they be met? Responding to these questions, in this presentation I reflect on the Radical Imagination Project, a social movement research initiative based in Halifax, NS, that ran from 2010-2017. Specifically, I focus on the final research phase of the Project which used ethnographic methods to curate and broadcast movement-based knowledge drawn from experienced organizers about building movements capable of fighting and winning social change struggles over “the long haul.” Critically considering the successes and failures of the Project, this presentation is an attempt at synthesizing the lessons it offered as a process of rigorous and politically-engaged grassroots inquiry for movement-building and social change.

Alex Khasnabish is an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian writer, researcher, teacher, and organizer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia on unceded and unsurrendered Mi’kmaw territory. He is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Mount Saint Vincent University. His books include What Moves Us: The Lives and Times of the Radical Imagination (co-edited with Max Haiven), The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity (with Max Haiven), Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Ethnography, Activism, and the Political (co-edited with Jeffrey Juris), Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global, and Zapatismo Beyond Borders: New Imaginations of Political Possibility.