Research
Studio
Working Group: “Imaginative Methods – the radical and the critical in research”
Led by Gillian Russell & Frédérik Lesage
This working group is a fortnightly gathering of graduate students across various schools who are employing, or aim to employ, imaginative methods as a part of their research. Recent scholarship in the social sciences, humanities, art and design has drawn attention to the politics of the imagination, arguing for the radical imagination as a key device for thinking and acting in times of crisis (Escobar, 2018; Haiven, 2014; Keeling, 2019; Khasnabish & Haiven, 2017). These scholars and practitioners define the radical imagination as a way to “reimagine the imagination”, and as a collective process that holds the potential to animate new ways of perceiving and thinking about the world. By bringing together the radical and imagination, they suggest a methodological commitment to the transformation of reality. However, while calls for the imagination abound, to date there are few resources to help researchers incorporate this collective process into their own research practices.
This group sets out to explore, assess, and analyze various methodological approaches for animating the radical imagination through method. Together we will engage in critical reflections with conceptual and methodological frameworks, case studies, and hands-on workshops to further our knowledge of how to weave together the imagination and method.
Workshop Series: “The Way We See It”
These workshop sessions are designed to invite researchers to consider how imaginative methods can be incorporated into various stages of their ongoing research process. We invite researchers to collectively share and explore their research projects (including any researchers affiliated with the lab) in open-ended sessions that function as co-creation sessions to help researchers reflect on key concepts related to their investigations through modalities other than the written word and how insights gained from such reflections could apply to further developing theory and methodology.
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Event / Talk / Conference
Fabulation and digital fluencies: A case study of the Fables for Imagining Workshop
Presented by: Gillian Russell, Frédérik Lesage, & Craig Badke
Global Media Education Summit 2023
Bournemouth University
Vancouver, BC
March 2nd – 4th 2023
Fables are one of humanity’s oldest forms of storytelling; sharing tales of moral inquiry and caution, told through archetypal characters, to build shared wisdom, interrogate power, and navigate societal roles and responsibilities. Fables for Imagining is a storymaking tool we designed that adapted these aspects of fables as a means to build digital fluencies that extend beyond common understandings of the development of technology to add a dimension of criticality. This talk will present the tool through a close reading of a series of workshops we ran to test the method. The workshops guided participants in developing their own techno-social fables as a means to draw out how digital technologies shape our world, while building a collective imagination for our future selves and society. Drawing on the work of Daniela Rosner, Saidiya Hartman, and Donna Haraway the workshops employ fabulation (storymaking through fables) as an imaginative method that adds a criticality to digital literacies. By bringing the social and political content and context of technological subjects to the fore, Fables for Imagining enables participants to develop digital fluencies to re-figure and question their existing situations.
The project is an initiative of the Imaginative Methods Lab (SFU) that combines tactics of critical design with elements of new materialist epistemology and practice-based research to assist people to collectively (re)think the present, apprehend the unknown, and intervene in the world.
Fables for Imagining: Critical storymaking and digital literacies
Presented by: Gillian Russell, Frédérik Lesage, & Craig Badke
DRS2022 BILBAO
FRI, 1 JULY 2022 15:00 – 18:00 CEST
Fables are one of humanity’s oldest forms of storytelling; sharing tales of moral inquiry and caution through archetypal characters to build shared wisdom, interrogate power, and navigate societal roles and responsibilities. Fables for Imagining explores how this form of storymaking can be used to interrogate our contemporary collective behaviours and modes of existence with a specific focus on questions of civility in a post-digital world. Responding to the impacts of accelerating technology, connectivity, and a rapidly changing social environment, this workshop leads participants to develop a series of techno-social fables designed to draw out the radical ways digital technologies are reshaping our world, while building a collective imagination for our future selves and society.
Publication
Book: Imaginative Methods
by Gillian Russell and Frédérik Lesage (In process)
Born out of dark times, Imaginative Methods argues that we must turn to the critical imagination to think and act in times of crisis. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary approaches, this collection of methods provides inspiration and guidance to researchers interested in engaging publics to re(think) the present, apprehend the unknown, and intervene in the world. Understanding that we need to expand the empirical toolkit to fully encounter research as a collective endeavour, and to extend the rights of research into the public domain, Imaginative Methods redesigns method. Presented as a purposeful thinking otherwise of research drawn from art, design, and the social sciences, Imaginative Methods offers a truly unique take on how to imagine through method. A commitment to transforming reality, this collection of methods – ranging from Prompting to Yarning, Tasking and Charretting – provides critical and creative tools to inspire action and new forms of solidarity.
Article: Reimagine Futures
by Gillian Russell
Born out of dark times, Imaginative Methods argues that we must turn to the critical imagination to think and act in times of crisis. Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary approaches, this collection of methods provides inspiration and guidance to researchers interested in engaging publics to re(think) the present, apprehend the unknown, and intervene in the world. Understanding that we need to expand the empirical toolkit to fully encounter research as a collective endeavour, and to extend the rights of research into the public domain, Imaginative Methods redesigns method. Presented as a purposeful thinking otherwise of research drawn from art, design, and the social sciences, Imaginative Methods offers a truly unique take on how to imagine through method. A commitment to transforming reality, this collection of methods – ranging from Prompting to Yarning, Tasking and Charretting – provides critical and creative tools to inspire action and new forms of solidarity.