Kathleen Gallagher - Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research through Performative Methodologies

The Radical Hope project gathers a team of youth researchers to investigate one of the central existential questions of our age:who am I, relative to others, and what compels me to act upon my world?

A question of this immensity requires a deep and sustained enquiry. It calls for attention to the nexus between agency, identity and citizenry.

It is most appropriate then that the Radical Hope project responds to the relevance and global importance of this question via research sites in five very different countries: Canada, Greece, India, England, and Taiwan. The project conducted across a five-year period embraces the research efforts of a team of 17 investigators and the active engagement of 250 young people ranging in ages from early teens to early twenties. In this, the project offers a rare opportunity to engage with young peoples views about global citizenry through a genuinely cross-national project.

The researchers call on embodied, dialogical, and performative methods of enquiry evolved from drama and theatre traditions. In this, they work to explore the nexus between ethics and aesthetics in the relational process of participatory enquiry. They use performative methods to position young people as active agents in the sustained collective enquiry. These performative methods offer a rich modality through which to explore and communicate the affective nature of experience. Here, the focus on the aesthetics of enquiry offers rich contribution for those seeking methods which embrace the interconnectedness of the individual and the social, the personal and the political, and the material and discursive. In this, the collected works within the book make a contribution towards the purpose and place of aesthetic expression in research (p. 8).

The team led by Kathleen Gallagher investigates the construct of radical hope. Gallagher introduces this concept as one which builds on the notion of radical imagination which entails a collective aspirational urge towards transformative action (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). Building on her prior research with young people, she argues that hope is a relational practice, not a possession. Hence, the socialdoingof hope and the transformative interest in theproductionof hope is of central interest in this enquiry, as is the work of harnessing the imagination, or the visioning of alternative possibilities through which to orient social and political action. For Gallagher and her fellow investigators, radical hope is aspirational. It is not a prediction of what will come to pass, but rather an ethical and affective vision of what is desirable and what it is people believe can or should be made possible.