Max Haiven

Max Haiven is a writer, educator and movement organizer, and Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media, and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Northwest Ontario where he directs the the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL). Primarily, Haiven’s research has focused on the financialization of society and culture over the past forty years. He has published on this theme in journals including Social Text, Cultural Studies, Cultural Politics, Mediations, Radical History Review and Cultural Logic. His first scholarly monograph Cultures of Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life was published by Palgrave Macmillan in August of 2014. He is currently is co-director (with Alex Khasnabish) of the Radical Imagination Project an ethnographic solidarity research initiative dedicated to understanding and enlivening radicalism and activism. Their book The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity was published by Zed Books in July of 2014. Haiven’s sole-authored academic work on the politics and economics of the imagination has appeared in journals including Cultural Critique and The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies. He also frequently writes for non-academic venues, including Truth-Out, Open Democracy and ROAR Magazine. His book Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power: Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons was published by Zed Books in March 2014. He holds a PhD in English and Cultural Studies from McMaster University and an MA in Globalization Studies from the same. He spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Public Policy at New York University and five years teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. His work has been translated into Turkish, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Japanese and he lectures worldwide. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled Art after Money, Money after Art: Radical Creative Strategies Against Financialization.