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In our current digital era, imagination and the cultural and material conditions by which it is developed are more crucially than ever implicated in the experienced adversities and contradictions of drug use. The technological changes of society underscore the need for rethinking dominant understandings which portray addiction as an immediate and even mindless relation between a person and a substance or behavior, only minimally affected by subjective significance and historical alterations of everyday life. Indeed, from ancient mythology to our modern times drugs have been part of our cultural history. Understandings and practices of their uses have developed through cultural ideas and cultural-material conditions like traditions, rituals and routines. Today, the omnipresence of digital media in everyday life is massively changing and expanding such cultural and material conditions. Digital media equip people with associations between drugs and an incredible abundance of images, ideas, facts, fiction, narratives, plots, soundtracks, characters, and much more, and thereby expanding their imaginable potentials for providing answers to biographical questions. People and potential drug use become connected in novel and labyrinthine ways through digital communities and arrangements of everyday life. And digital media are part of and transform the cultural-material practices in which activities and experiences of intoxication actually take place. In the book, all these details are extensively analyzed empirically based on qualitative data on the lives of a number of young, Danish people who were undergoing treatment for drug-related problems at the time of the research. An underlying premise of the entire work is that addiction may be seen as a more extreme expression of how the technological developments in our contemporary world more generally speaking magnify the contradictory implications of imagination for modern living. Over the recent years, psychological research into the significance of the human capacity to imagine for how people deal with and live their lives has received growing attention. Yet, the complex involvement of imagination in actual living and consequently the theoretical cruxes this engenders continue to amaze and surprise research and researchers. This book also contributes to these theoretical ambitions with a substantial work on the concept of imagination. It primarily suggests that a critical discussion of how imagining is essentially a contradictory process in everyday life and how it is always grounded in the agency of material aspects, ranging anywhere from mundane artifacts over mediated content to advanced technologies, is ultimately what makes the scientific study of imagination relevant to understanding and intervening in the dilemmas and crises of modern life and society. The book will primarily interest scholars of social psychology of everyday life, scholars working conceptually and empirically on imagination, scholars of social studies of media, materiality and technology, and researchers or practitioners working with addictions.
Despite the wide interest in material culture, art, and aesthetics, few studies have considered them in light of the importance of the social imagination - the complex ways in which we conceptualize our social surroundings. This collection engages the “material turn” in the arts, humanities, and social sciences through a range of original contributions on creativity in diverse global and contemporary social settings. The authors engage with everyday objects, art, rituals, and ethnographic exhibitions to analyze the relationship between material culture and the social imagination. What results is a better understanding of how the material embodies and influences our idea of the social world.
Our lives are filled with objects—ones that we carry with us, that define our homes, that serve practical purposes, and that hold sentimental value. When they are broken, lost, left behind, or removed from their context, they can feel alien, take on a different use, or become trash. The lives of objects change when our relationships to them change. Maia Kotrosits offers a fresh perspective on objects, looking beyond physical material to consider how collective imagination shapes the formation of objects and the experience of reality. Bringing a psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of material culture, she examines objects of attachment—relationships, ideas, and beliefs that live on in the psyche—and illustrates how people across time have anchored value systems to the materiality of life. Engaging with classical studies, history, anthropology, and literary, gender, and queer studies, Kotrosits shows how these disciplines address historical knowledge and how an expanded definition of materiality can help us make connections between antiquity and the contemporary world.
In recent years architectural discourse has witnessed a renewed interest in materiality under the guise of such familiar tropes as 'material honesty,' 'form finding,' or 'digital materiality.' As an alternative to a formal approach in architectural design, this book challenges readers to rethink the reverie of materials in architecture through an examination of historical precedent, architectural practice, literary sources, philosophical analyses and everyday experience. Focusing on matter as the premise of an architect’s imagination, each chapter identifies and graphically illustrates how material imagination defines the conceptual premises for making architecture.
Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief—whether religious or secular—have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material. Considering topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors—most of whom are anthropologists—examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences. Their case studies show that the latest forms of financial trading instruments can be compared with the oldest ideals of ancient Egypt, that the promise of software can be compared with an age-old desire for an unmediated relationship to divinity. Whether focusing on the theology of Islamic banking, Australian Aboriginal art, derivatives trading in Japan, or textiles that respond directly to their environment, each essay adds depth and nuance to the project that Materiality advances: a profound acknowledgment and rethinking of one of the basic properties of being human. Contributors. Matthew Engelke, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Bill Maurer, Lynn Meskell, Daniel Miller, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Fred Myers, Christopher Pinney, Michael Rowlands, Nigel Thrift
Written by an international team of experts, the Handbook makes accessible a full range of theoretical and applied approaches to the study of material culture, and the place of materiality in social theory, presenting current thinking about material culture from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies.
Though many psychological theories refer to imagination as a relevant phenomena, we still lack knowledge about imaginative processes. The book “The Method of Imagination” is aimed at expanding the knowledge about imaginative processes as higher mental function, by starting from the empirical and phenomenological studies. The volume is an innovative multidisciplinary exploration in the study of imaginative processes as complex phenomena. It covers a wide range of fields, from psychology to sociology, from art and design to marketing and education. The book gathers young and experienced scholars from 6 different countries worldwide, providing a fresh look into the theoretical, methodological and applicative aspects of imagination studies. The audience for this book includes scholars and students in social and human sciences interested in the study and the use of imaginative processes. The volume can be also used as textbook/integrative reading in undergrad and master courses.
The cultural theorist and media designer Anne Balsamo calls for transforming learning practices to inspire culturally attuned technological imaginations.
Focusing on the highly diverse Karenni refugee population living in camps on the Thai-Burma border, this innovative book explores materiality, embodiment, memory, imagination, and identity among refugees, providing new and important ways of understanding how refugees make sense of experience, self, and other. It examines how and to what ends refugees perceive, represent, manipulate, use as metaphor, and otherwise engage with material objects and spaces, and includes a focus on the real and metaphorical journeys that bring about and perpetuate exile. The combined emphasis on both displacement and materiality, and the analysis of the cultural construction and intersections of exilic objects, spaces, and bodies, are unique in the study of both refugees and material culture. Drawing theoretical influences from phenomenology, aesthetics, and beyond, as well as from refugee studies and anthropology, the author addresses the current lack of theoretical analysis of the material, visual, spatial, and embodied aspects of forced migration, providing a fundamentally interlinked analysis of enforced exile and materiality.
Imagination allows individuals and groups to think beyond the here-and-now, to envisage alternatives, to create parallel worlds, and to mentally travel through time. Imagination is both extremely personal (for example, people imagine unique futures for themselves) and deeply social, as our imagination is fed with media and other shared representations. As a result, imagination occupies a central position within the life of mind and society. Expanding the boundaries of disciplinary approaches, the Handbook of Imagination and Culture expertly illustrates this core role of imagination in the development of children, adolescents, adults, and older persons today. Bringing together leading scholars in sociocultural psychology and neighboring disciplines from around the world, this edited volume guides readers towards a much deeper understanding of the conditions of imagining, its resources, its constraints, and the consequences it has on different groups of people in different domains of society. Summarily, this Handbook places imagination at the center, and offers readers new ways to examine old questions regarding the possibility of change, development, and innovation in modern society.