Illuminating Golden Threads

Pedagogical creativity can function as a vehicle to facilitate connection, restore humanity, and nurture critical hope in the classroom and beyond. Pedagogical creativity is essential and urgent as the confluence of the pandemic, civil unrest, and online learning have created dehumanized, unprecedented learning conditions. This chapter details an undergraduate general education course that leveraged contemporary young adult literature for cultural reformation and to promote social justice. This chapter provides examples of students enacting creativity and social imagination and concludes with a discussion of creativity in connection to this chapter's guiding questions.

Imaginary and Rational: From Social Theory to Social Order

The article is devoted to the analysis of imagination as a philosophical and sociological concept that played a significant role in the development of social theory in the middle of the 20th century. Exploring the premises of the contradictory relationship between science and society, it is easy to find a connection between the development of science and social change. Currently, it is generally accepted that scientific, including social theories, through the transfer of ideas, transform the social order and, on the contrary, social practices transform knowledge about the world. The article proves that imagination plays a key role in this process. An excursion into the theory of ideas reveals the connection between imagination and irrational and experiential knowledge. The author of the article refers to the works of P. Berger and T. Luckmann, C. Castoriadis and C. Taylor, who showed a direct connection between theoretical ideas and the world of "social imaginary", collective imaginary and social changes. For the first time in the history of mankind, thanks to imagination, society does not see the social order as something immutable. Methodological cases are presented that illustrate the specific role of the concept of imagination as a source of the formation of new research strategies that allow for a new look at the problem of nationalism (social constructivism) and the study of public expectations from the implementation of technological innovations (STS). For decades, Benedict Anderson's work “Imagined Communities” predetermined the interest of researchers of nationalism in social imagination and the collective ideas based on it about the national identity of modern societies, their history and geography. The research of Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim has formed a new track for the study of science as a collective product of public expectations of an imaginary social order, embodied in technological projects. The conclusion is made about the contradictory nature of social expectations based on collective imagination: on the one hand, they strengthen the authority of science in society, on the other hand, they provoke the growth of negative expectations from the introduction of scientific discoveries. The article substantiates the opinion that imagination is an effective tool for assessing the risks of introducing innovations.

Towards a spatialized utopia: romanticism and everyday life in the Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

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.

in participatory design processes for civic sense-making

Participatory design (PD) has been considerably broadening the gaze of the design discipline. This produced a huge impact on design processes, boosting the academic dialogue and engaging institutions as well as diverse forms of publics in give together form to the public sphere. Participatory processes can play an important role in reframing issues and reconfiguring behaviours in the common realm, opening the social imagination to boost citizenship awareness. In this paper, the authors investigate the potential role of narratives for PD activities as a key to interpret the cultural heritage and the social ecosystem of an urban settlement. They do so by supporting the development of a diffused capability of envisioning both a better present as well as a better future with and for citizens, leveraging design’s down-to-earth capacity to foresee possibilities for change. The potential of narratives for PD practices is investigated here by means of a situated and cross-disciplinary research project for the city of Ivrea (Italy), which served both to contextualise new ideas as well as to develop new techniques, pursuing the hybridisation of PD processes with storytelling and design fiction, and developing tools borrowed from science fiction, spatial design and narratology.

Między ratio a emotum. Polsko-rosyjskie postrzeganie wzajemne w perspektywie binarnej

A characteristic feature of Polish-Russian mutual perception is binarity, manifesting itself in various discursive spaces, from colloquial stereotypes, through popular literature, to sophisticated forms of meta-historical discourse. Asian-Europeanness, Latin-Byzantism/Orthodoxy, collectivism-individualism, and authenticity-falsehood, are just some of the oppositions that organise the social imagination of Poles and Russians in the sphere of their mutual assessments and opinions. The article draws attention to the partial manifestations of such oppositions (literary discourse, postcolonial studies, etc.) in order to show their hidden, dialectical dimension. To achieve this goal, the author refers to the category of ratio and emotum, which refers to a specific current of the European philosophical tradition. Both of these binary categories are the foundation for creating an image of the Other. They also fit into self-defining strategies important for understanding Polish and Russian identity.

Metaphors of Society: The Medieval and Early Modern Social Imagination (In Lieu of an Introduction)

The article serves as an introduction to the publication of papers presented at the conference on Social Entities and their Metaphorical Interpetations. It raises the question of how people described social structures in the Middle Ages and Early Modern time, when no abstract concept of society existed, and the principles of its stratification were completely different in comparison to ours. According to the author, in order to enter the realm of social imagination of the past, we should remember that people then interpreted the structure of society mainly in terms of metaphors, using figures such as human body, chess, tree, wheel, etc. It is these metaphors that are analyzed in the articles based on conference papers and published below. The authors try to analyze social order images described in various written and visual sources.

Engaging the Social Imagination in the College Classroom Through Radiant Readings of Global Picturebooks

Building on Kelly Wissman’s (2019) work, the article describes and analyzes artifacts from the author’s college children’s literature class, during which students read radiantly: in ways that may take them outside of themselves, their realities, and points of view, “like rays emitting from the sun, to seek out alternative perspectives, new directions, and unique pathways” (p. 16). The analysis of these collected student artifacts is guided by Wissman’s understanding of the social imagination as the capacity of a reader to imagine “the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of others” as well as “to invent visions of what should be and what might be” (p. 15). It also builds on the theoretical framework developed by Kathy Short (2019) in relation to the social responsibility that needs to be practiced and cultivated by those involved in the creating, teaching, and reading of global children’s literature. Nurturing reading as an act of creativity and fostering dialogic inquiry around global picturebooks is shown to be quite effective in engaging college students’ social imagination. The author brings evidence from the prompts and artifacts that supports this effectiveness, demonstrating the different ways in which students were able to read Two White Rabbits (2015) and The Arrival (2007) radiantly. The prompts that were designed for these immigration-themed picturebooks were successful in nurturing reading as an act of creativity and fostering dialogic inquiry, and thus succeeded in engaging the students’ social imagination. A main reason behind their success was that, by design, they required readers to use their imagination and creativity as well as pay close attention to the picturebooks’ visual aesthetics in order to fill in the gaps. Another important reason behind the students’ radiant readings was the selection of these specific picturebooks, which fit Jessica Whitelaw’s (2017) definition of disquieting picturebooks as they encourage their readers to embrace unfamiliarity and discomfort.

Speaking with All Boldness

This chapter examines the complex role of prison in the social imagination of the Roman world by outlining four common tropes: the prisoner of war, the fallen aristocrat, the common malefactor, and the unvanquished herald of truth. Whereas most treatments of the ancient prison reproduce the elite perspective of their literary sources, this survey privileges evidence that attests to the experience of the non-elite. This provides a richly textured backdrop against which to read Paul’s suggestive yet curiously undeveloped self-depiction as a prisoner, and, in particular, his insistence that he will continue in all boldness (parrhēsia) despite his chains. With his non-elite addressees inclined in any case to sympathize with his plight, here Paul gestures toward a familiar trope wherein prison signifies the tyrant’s ineffectual attempt to silence a divine messenger.