What do We, Critical Academics, do With the Imaginaries of Others?

This essay lays out some provocations that attempt to probe the relationship between critical academic practice and actualization of imaginaries and utopian thinking. Based on epistemic meta reflections derived from my research into the relationship between climate fiction and climate activism and with particular focus on the operation of conflicting imaginaries surrounding the climate crisis, the essay sketches different problematic investments implicated by the critical academic analysis of these imaginaries. It then moves on to speculates on the role that such research may play in the reproduction and reinforcement of a political and social reality that is itself supportive of the extractive and exploitative, colonial, and capitalist practices that brought the crisis about. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Martin Savransky, the theorists Fred Moten and Stefarno Harney and the cultural critic Mark Fisher, this essay proposes a novel set of considerations for how those who consider themselves critical academics may more ethically engage with the imaginaries of others by committing to the paradoxical nature of their position, and their own imaginary understanding of it, as both critics of and complicit with a system of extractive violence.