Social imagination and the politics of crisis

10.20336/13 ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Markus S Schulz
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane

This largely descriptive chapter introduces the reader to the specific features and functions of each type of hostelry and provides a broad-brush picture of their historical development, activities, ways they influenced each other, and importance in their role in out-of-home consumption of food, drink, and sociality. It outlines their social, economic, and political functions, and places them in their societal context. The pub was always the lowest in the social hierarchy among the three. Yet, it has been the longest survivor and has gradually taken over some of the functions formerly performed by inns and taverns. Inns and taverns, however, persist in the British social imagination and, where their buildings have survived, they lend distinction to a village or part of town. Both continuities and changes over time, as well as some overlap between the three hostelries, are described using examples of places and personalities.


2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 152-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Webb

AbstractWe are in the depths of multiple catastrophes that Western society is seemingly unwilling and unable to address: growing inequalities between the rich and the poor, a willful blindness to climate change, and a political system mired in uncompromising and ever increasing extremism. However, there are no reality transcending dialogues, no new social imaginaries to drive change—our own dystopic reality has no utopian response. The greatest importance that the Occupy movements may play in spurring social change and revolution is their success at bringing radical discourses into mainstream society. Occupy not only occupied fixed public locations, but also occupied our social imagination.


Author(s):  
César Simoni Santos

The presence of the spatial element in the reflections of Henri Lefebvre does not merely result from work involving the translation and adaptation of critical thinking developed up until his time. The realization that not even the highest expression of the critical tradition had sufficiently noticed this crucial dimension of life was one of the connecting points between theoretical advance, represented by the spatial orientation of critique, and the effort to renew the utopian horizon. A very distinct assimilation of the early work of Marx and the proximity to revolutionary romanticism, particularly of Nietzschean extraction, rendered a decisive impact on Lefebvrian conception. Practice, body, pleasure and instincts, recovering their place in the critical social imagination, went on to become the basis for the re-foundation of a theoretical-practical program that involved the formulation of the notion of the right to the city. The perspective of appropriation thus replaced the vague emancipatory statements of the subject's philosophies.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esteban Lythgoe

AbstractIn this paper we intend to show that in Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricœur articulates memory and history through imagination. This philosopher distinguishes two main functions of imagination: a poetical one, associated with interpretation and discourse, and a practical and projective one that clarifies and guides our actions. In Memory, History, Forgetting, both functions of imagination are present, but are associated with different aspects of memory. The first one is present especially in the phenomenology of the cognitive dimension of memory; the second one is developed in the analysis of the abuses of artificial memory, while their convergence is described in the section on the abuses of natural memory. Besides the similarities in the way these functions of imagination operate in Oneself as Another and in Memory, History, Forgetting, we will show some important differences between these two works and we will propose reasons for these differences.Keywords: Poetical Imagination, Practical Imagination, Abused Memory, Ideology, Utopy.RésuméDans cet article nous souhaiterions montrer que, dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, l’imagination productrice est ce qui permet d’articuler la mémoire et l´histoire. Ricœur distingue deux principales fonctions de l’imagination: l’une, poétique, associée à l’interprétation et au discours ; l’autre pratique et projective, qui éclaire et oriente nos actions. Dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, ces deux fonctions de l’imagination sont présentes mais elles sont associées à des aspects différents de la mémoire. La première est surtout présente dans la phénoménologie de la dimension cognitive de la mémoire, la seconde apparaît dans l’analyse des abus de la mémoire artificielle, et l’articulation entre ces deux fonctions se trouve enfin décrite dans la section concernant l’abus de la mémoire naturelle. Outre les similitudes dans la façon dont ces fonctions de l’imagination opèrent dans Soi-même comme un autre et dans La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, nous essaierons de montrer qu’il existe cependant certaines différences importantes entre ces deux œuvres en tentant d’en expliciter les raisons.Mots-clés: Imagination poétique, imagination pratique, mémoire abusée, idéologie, utopie.


2020 ◽  
pp. 208-239
Author(s):  
Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves ◽  
Grace Polifroni Turtle ◽  
Antonio Calleja ◽  
Raul Nieves Pardo ◽  
Bani Brusadin ◽  
...  

Data Control Wars seeks to explore the development of different futures regarding the extraction, management and exploitation of data and its political, economic and cultural consequences. It has been designed as a research-action device through play, generative conflict, collaborative fiction and performance with three specific objectives: to observe social expectations regarding the relationship between industry, democracy, citizenship and data; to stimulate social imagination through the simulation of sociotechnical scenarios, thus decolonising imaginaries captured by techno-capitalist logic; and to rehearsal transition strategies towards technological sovereignty. This article presents the Data Control Wars case study and explains its functioning. Moreover, it sets out the theoretical scaffolding – which goes from post-human philosophy to critical design passing through the sociology of expectations – that supports it and presents some of the results. After three activations in three different contexts, Data Control Wars has proven useful as an educational tool to address the potential positive and negative effects of using data, as a space for testing strategies on transition design, as a method to identify some of the myths articulated by the social perception of the technological industry and the power of agency that we hold over it and, finally, as a device to question techno-capitalist cultural hegemony through the construction of other stories about what the technosocial body can be.


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