The Centrality of Political Imagination and Activist Commitments: Reenvisioning the Philosophy of Revolutionary Praxis

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Living the Dystopian-Utopian Tension as Praxis: Transformative Dreaming With/in/for Education and Educational Research

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to identify and address one of the central challenges present across critical sociocultural scholarship and pedagogies that is engaged in various ways yet remains unresolved. This challenge has to do with conceptually integrating the notions of political imagination and commitment to building a better society into the core premises about human development and education. Specifically, the topic of political imagination, although prominent in critical approaches, has not been sufficiently addressed in terms of its role in building a coherent framework encompassing onto-epistemological, methodological, and ethical dimensions and topics (as one ethico-onto-episte-method-ology, cf. Barad 2007; Stetsenko, 2016). Indeed, conjectures on the nature of reality (the ontological dimension); the processes by which we get to understand reality (the epistemological dimension); and the core ethical-valuational aspects that play into the core dynamics of development and education (the ethical dimension) have not been revised so as to allow for political imagination to be central to these dimensions. Further, political imagination has been often engaged alongside a detachment from the specifics of the struggle for a better future in terms of concrete ideas and ideals (or a concrete socio-political ethos) about what future society could and should be and a particular commitment to realizing this “sought-after future” (Stetsenko, 2016). Although critical and sociocultural scholarship does acknowledge that research is infused with politics that impress the entire project of science, political commitments are often perceived to lie outside research (cf. Morawski, 2011). These trends grew out and further supported the overall developments of the last decades expressed in a skeptical stance vis-à-vis the possibilities of broad political changes and revolutionary praxis – as epitomized in the infamous “end of history” and “end of ideology” metaphors that came along with the “end of theory” sentiments, all coalescing in what has been termed “the diet of unrelieved gloom” (Crook, 2003).

The mode of inquiry employed herein is to systematically analyze the conceptual roots and the sociopolitical context of Marxist philosophy of praxis through surveying the original texts and their later appropriations in diverging trends of Marxism as it evolved through decades and in other critical approaches – all while surveying the analytical gaps that prevent integrating the Marxist initial political imagination and activist commitment into theories of human development and education. Two diverging models of addressing this challenge will be identified – the Marxist-Vygotskian-Freirean approaches that posit a concrete commitment to a sought-after future versus postmodernist approaches that abstain from such commitments (viewing them as “master narratives”) to instead focus on micro-politics along with pluralities and contingences of knowing. Concomitantly, a number of steps to facilitate theorizing political imagination and activism will be sketched. The significance of this analysis is that a closer engagement with theorizing these topics is necessary, especially in the present sociopolitical climate, for rallying resistance to research being used for manipulation and control rather than for revolutionary praxis with an activist agenda to building a better future premised on social justice and equality.

Author

• Anna Stetsenko, City University of New York