Description
Military and carceral institutions are sites where gendered and hypermasculine cultures produce and compound individual and collective trauma. Yet, dominant research on military and carceral trauma often isolates individual experiences from their structural origins, limiting possibilities for transformative change and perpetuating 'damaged-centred' research (Tuck, 2009). This paper argues for a different approach: collective imagination methodologies that, combined with somatic practice, speculative futuring, and participatory design, can both reveal institutional structures and help repair them. Drawing on a research partnership with artist Melanie Crean (New School, New York), I will present findings from participatory workshops with incarcerated military veterans and key decision makers in the UK. These workshops created spaces for veterans to share experiences of harm and collaboratively envision alternative systems of care grounded in mutual accountability and relational healing (Crean and Murray, 2026). The paper positions imagination as a rigorous form of knowledge production that interrupts entrenched cultures and extractivist research logics. The paper concludes by examining the ethical commitments and accountability required in this work, offering both a methodological contribution to critical military studies and a model for catalysing institutional change.
