Hope, political imagination, and agency in Marxism and beyond: Explicating the transformative worldview and ethico-ontoepistemology

• Published in: Educational philosophy and theory 2020-06, Vol.52 (7), p.726-737
• Main Author: Stetsenko, Anna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Activism; Activists; Capital; Critical race theory; Critical Theory; Criticism; Distributive justice; Educational Philosophy; Epistemology; ethics; Feminism; future; Imagination; Marxism; Materialism; ontology; Personal Autonomy; Political Attitudes; politics; Psychological Patterns; Race; resistance; Role; Social Change; Social Justice; Social Problems; Social Systems; Sociocultural factors; Subjectivity; Teaching; Teaching Methods; Transformation; Transformative Learning; World Views; Worldview
• ISSN: 0013-1857; 1469-5812
• DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1654373

Given the sociopolitical crisis and turmoil in the world today, there is a great need for philosophical and sociocultural critiques that are not only concerned with deconstructing the present and the past but also with offering forward-looking, radical solutions to the problems and challenges we face. Drastic times call for drastic measures, including in exploring and advancing a flagrantly partisan scholarship with explicitly transformative activist agendas of strengthening the public and personal agency needed to constrain capital for the sake of social and economic justice. The argument advanced in this article is that Marxism - reinvigorated, re-envisioned and infused with insights from recent scholarship in feminism, critical pedagogy, cultural-historical and critical race theories, and new materialism, among others - can offer a new worldview in which political imagination and other phenomena of human subjectivity find their due, that is, central and formative place to thus allow for the advancement of research with activist agendas as a form of resistance. In utilizing such a worldview, research and theoretical constructions can break away from the ethos of adaptation and instead to actively strive for social transformation based in a radical reworking of the status and role of political imagination and associated notions of agency, hope, and commitment.