Alternative Imaginaries Research Articles

Imaginaries of Sustainability: The Techno-Politics of Smart Cities

ABSTRACT Sustainability, particularly as articulated in cities, acts as an imaginary that shapes science, technology and social order to attain desirable futures. Imaginaries of sustainability represent visions of social and natural well-being now and into the future. Like sociotechnical imaginaries, imaginaries of sustainability are both descriptive of potential futures and prescriptive about the futures that ought to be pursued. Proponents of smart cities tout the ability of technology and big data to accelerate democratization and public participation, yet these projects carry embedded assumptions about knowledge production, technological risks, public engagement and broader visions of the good life. Smart cities discourses and technologies shape and become enrolled in both imaginaries of sustainability and sociotechnical imaginaries. Through case studies of smart cities and sustainability in London and New York City, notions of technological progress are shown to be linked with progress on environmental and social sustainability issues. In both New York and London, smart cities are entangled with techno-political projects related to innovation and economic development as well as normative commitments to sustainability. Though imaginaries of sustainability present a set of goals and values for science and technology, techno-politics dominated by corporate actors and techno-scientific optimists may ultimately prevent cities from opening up space for alternative imaginaries.

Contesting growth in marine capture fisheries: the case of small-scale fishing cooperatives in Istanbul

The expansion of industrial fishing via technological advancements and heavy subsidies in the Global North has been a significant factor leading to the current global fishery crisis. The growth of the industrial fleet led to an initial increase in global catches from the 1950s to the 1990s; yet, today, several marine fish stocks are harvested at unsustainable rates, and catches are stagnating. As a result, industrial fishers increase investments and fishing effort, reaching farther and deeper, while small-scale fishers face the threat of disappearance as both their catches and livelihoods worsen. The emergent international emphasis on Blue Growth is likely to put further pressure on marine capture fisheries. This paper explores how the growth imperative in the seas has manifested itself in Turkey since the 1970s and how industrial and small-scale fishers responded to this growth spiral in the seas. Based on participant observation methods and in-depth interviews, this paper problematizes the expanding boundaries of industrial fishers and examines the reactions of small-scale fishing cooperatives in Istanbul, in particular their proposed alternative economic model, as a response to the growth imperative. Overall, the paper demonstrates that the crisis that small-scale fishers are facing not only presents economic and ecological difficulties, but also represents an existential threat to the identity and traditional ways of life as a fisher. The strategies adopted by small-scale fishers in response to this crisis in Turkey, especially in Istanbul, are politicizing fishers as they open up new spaces, collaborations, and demands for environmental, social, and economic justice. However, their efforts constitute an ongoing process prone to numerous tensions and contradictions. This paper concludes that challenging the growth paradigm in fisheries via the Blue Degrowth framework can be useful for analyzing emerging alternative imaginaries to the growth-driven capitalist economic system among small-scale fishers.

Affective labour of creating atmospheres

In this article, we suggest that the production of atmospheres is a significant form of the capitalisation of affect – the ongoing cultural shift that encompasses diverse ways in which affect itself has become a selling point. We further the discussion of this capitalisation of affect by offering insights into forms of capitalisation that mobilise atmospheres rather than single, individual or clearly identified affects. Through two ethnographic case studies, we examine how affective labour is invested in the co-production of atmospheres during collective events in commercial settings. Audiences or participants are actively involved in the production of atmospheres, both intentionally and unintentionally. This kind of affective labour is collective, intercorporeal and trans-subjective and takes various forms from embodied activities to virtual processes. Furthermore, the co-production of atmospheres is itself a component of atmospheres. The article thus opens up new paths into the study of both affective labour and atmospheres, by providing alternative imaginaries to prevailing notions of affective labour.

Being “Rich towards God” in the Capitalocene: An Ecological/Economic Reading of Luke 12.13-34

In an age termed by some as the “Capitalocene,” Christianity and the biblical text are sources for developing alternative economic imaginations that respond to the contemporary ecological crisis. Noting the economic inequality and ecological destruction common to both first-century Palestine and twenty-first-century global capitalistic societies, this article draws upon world-ecology theory and offers an ecological-economic reading of the parable of the “rich fool” (Luke 12.13-34). I argue that the assumptions of neo-liberal economic ideology often determine our interpretation of this text. In contrast to the rich fool who lives beyond ecological limits and disconnects himself from his community, Jesus offers ravens and grasses as teachers of ecological wisdom: redefining “wealth” and what is required to be “rich towards God.” The article concludes by discussing how translation choices may assist readers to see the economic-ecological dimensions of this text.

Proving the world more imaginary?

Sustainability research has set itself the double-challenge of uncovering the complexity of a globally, locally and historically unsustainable development path, and of contributing to a search process for more sustainable development paths for humanity. A small number of researchers involved in this area have suggested “that maybe the challenge of sustainability isn’t to prove the world more real […] but to prove the world more imaginary” (Robinson as quoted in Taylor 2012, n. p.). Taking up this invocation of the imaginary, the article investigates some imaginaries and imagination of sustainability at play in sustainability research. Four relatively distinct approaches to sustainability research are identified, characterized and differentiated: “triple bottom-line”, “sustainability transformation”, “holistic healing/biophilia”, and “culture of qualitative complexity”. They each develop a specific focus, are nourished by partly different imaginaries and develop their imaginations in distinct directions. In this article, imagination is understood as an individual and social, perceptive and creative process by which we shape realities in our encounters with the world; whereas the imaginary is understood as a deep symbolic matrix that enables our access to the world. Imaginaries are not just made up and imposed on the world by the humans, but the result of an imaginative encounter with the human and other-than-human world. Focused attention on imagination and imaginaries not only allows to observe the area of sustainability research through a differentiating perspective that helps understand certain contrasting and/or shared features across different approaches to sustainability research. This focused attention also bears a potentially instrumental value for inter- and transdisciplinary sustainability research itself, because it encourages sustainability researchers to further reflect on the importance, modalities and different framings of creative and reflective approaches to futures-oriented research agendas. The creative exercise of the imagination is not only at the core of “anticipatory competences” (Wiek et al. 2011, p. 7) for sustainability, but also at the core of percipience to nature-culture’s dynamic complexity. In this respect, sustainability research needs to develop its self-reflexivity beyond discourse-rational approaches to narratives, with a deeper understanding of both embodied cognition and of culture. Reflection on, and radically imaginative work with both dominant and alternative imaginaries that sustainability researchers operate from, such as the four imaginaries discussed in this article, are a precondition to any movement beyond institutional path-dependency to a globally unsustainable development.

Territoriality and ancestral governance: the case of the Puel Nahuelbuta Mapuche Indigenous Development Area of Chile

The main objective of this article is to introduce the case of the Puel Nahuelbuta Indigenous Development Area (Mapuche, Chile) as a design practice that fosters local autonomy and, at the same time, contributes to the debate on radical alternative imaginaries towards post-patriarchal and post-capitalist social and cultural relations. In this context, the Az Mapu (knowledge of the natural order of the territory) rationality is important as a concept in the right way round indigenous territory and its governance. A second factor that stabilises the design practice of local autonomy is Kimün (ancestral philosophy or wisdom). Ixtrofil Mogen (living in biodiversity) and Küme Mogen (living well/good living), being the ability to reflect according to the experiences, knowledge and circumstances faced by a person or group, are central. The questioning of these notions highlights the controversy between social justice, indigenous social work and indigenous traditional knowledge.

Teaching Asian-American Litereature and American Multiculturalism in Singapore

This article examines the implications of teaching Asian American literature and American multiculturalism in Singapore. Using the multicultural and multilingual city-state of Singapore as a case study, I share the challenges and difficulties I experienced as an international teacher in my attempt to translate U.S. ethnic studies into a Singaporean classroom. The essay narrates how local Singaporean students conceptualize and understand U.S.-based multiculturalism and ethnic formation in relation to their own local experiences. Given that Chinese are the major ethnic group in Singapore, I observed how my students responded to Chinese exclusions in U.S. history and applied their findings to the history of Chinese Singaporeans and their relationships with other ethnic minorities in Singapore, such as Malay and Indian Singaporeans. This essay also describes a group assignment I designed asking students to visit five ethnic enclaves in Singapore after reading and discussing Asian American literature about a Chinatown in class. By performing this group work, my students critically compared and contrasted different ethnic settings, histories, and formations between the U.S. and Singapore. This essay ultimately argues that transnational pedagogy of ethnic studies can nourish the creation of alternative imaginaries by using literature to teach students to engage more fully with a different culture.

Urban agriculture in Kathmandu as a catalyst for the civic inclusion of migrants and the making of a greener city

This research explores the opportunities offered for the creation of a green city on the recently secured Bagmati riverbanks in Kathmandu, which is subject to rapid inward migration from landless rural farmers. The research asks what architectural theory and practice can contribute to this setting to support the fit between emergent bottom-up initiatives and top-down city investments. To this end, it deepens and extends loose fit theory, research methods, and reflective practices to investigate latent possibilities, assemble a narrative of embedded change, and create spatial imaginaries of topographical change on the Bagmati riverbanks. Moreover, it argues that architectural theory and practice can play a vital role in integrating migrants into civic institutions and helping generate a highly green city by making the relationships between setting and occupant explicit, stimulating and representing alternative imaginaries, and framing a civic discourse.

“Buoyant Cartographies”: Strata-Mapping the Detroit River Border

Abstract. In the early days of September 2018, a group of artists and researchers converged on the Detroit River (an international border between Detroit, Michigan, USA and Windsor, Ontario, Canada) to investigate the “Buoyant Cartographies” that this particular site demanded. As one of the parties involved in this participatory event (along with Lead Investigators In/Terminus Creative Research Group and Float School), my artist-research collective Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU) undertook an experimental mapping project that investigated the different “strata” of the place and the development of a “city-image.” The HPU Strata-Walk is an experimental and performative mapping methodology that focuses on how spatial meaning is created through a “stratigraphic” sensing of a site. The Detroit-Windsor border makes an especially compelling site for a Strata-Walk, in light of the conflicts over borders and walls in the current political environment, which presents an urgent need towards understanding and envisioning alternate possibilities for border zones. As a material site and geo-political space, the Detroit River border particularly benefits from intermedial investigations into spatial meanings and their construction. Notably, the role of folklore and local narratives on the internet and social media (and the erasure of Indigenous knowledge) figures large in developing one's knowledge of place. Experimental cartographies can thus help to develop alternate ways of seeing such sites.This presentation is an attempt to trace this particular event of “discovery,” an account of how a place becomes known and how intermedial practices influence the manifestation of space and experience. Inherent in this research is the overarching question of how one begins to decolonize public narratives of place, how gaps and erasures in knowledge can be located in order to demarcate a way forward for further study and action. With these concerns in mind, I conduct a preliminary analysis of the border site through the activities of the HPU and our specific “strata-walking” framework, which focuses on different approaches of mapping-as-process, from phenomenological, ethnographic and cultural landscape reading methodologies to networked, social and digital media research. This performative mapping can shape individual experiences of the border through the revealing of complex networks, flows, and narratives, and point to fissures where alternative imaginings might be possible. I will first begin with a brief introduction to the HPU’s methodologies, before situating them in a survey of relevant literatures around experimental and critical processes of mapping. Then, using photographic and textual documentation, I delve into some very preliminary results of the investigation, focusing on touristic experiences of border crossing as well as a look at the specific “imageability” of Peche Island in the Detroit River, a place of rumour and mystery, now a nature park maintained by the city of Windsor. The overall goal will be to demonstrate the necessity of experimental cartographies in the creation of alternate experiences and more reflexive narratives about the border zone, with the Detroit-Windsor border as a case study.

I, Daniel Blake (2016): Vulnerability, Care and Citizenship in Austerity Politics

This article offers a reading of Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, a fictionalised account of experiences of the UK welfare system in conditions of austerity. We consider, firstly, the significant challenge the film poses to dominant figurations of welfare recipients under austerity, through a focus on vulnerability to state processes. We follow with a reading of some of the film’s interventions in relation to reciprocity, drawing on the important trajectories of care, community and resistance that the film renders visible through the collective stories of the major characters. Finally, we conclude with reflections on citizenship, subject narratives and alternative imaginaries of ‘deservingness’. Our article offers an ‘against the grain’ reading (hooks, 1996; Wearing, 2013) of the film, highlighting some of the radical possibilities of the more minor moments, character arcs and subject positionalities within the film’s central narrative of Daniel’s experiences in the shadow of the steadily crumbling welfare state.

야담에 나타난 조선후기 과거문제의 현실과 대안적 상상력 - 법과 정의의 관계를 중심으로 -

야담에 나타난 조선후기 과거문제의 현실과 대안적 상상력 - 법과 정의의 관계를 중심으로 -

Tourism, heritage and cultural performance: Developing a modality of heritage tourism

Research has shown that heritage is a contested concept which not only creates unnecessary binaries but also perpetuates essentialized First World imagery of Asian countries. To assist in its reframing, this paper proposes critical ethnography. It is argued that through it, a more nuanced and community-based understanding of cultural heritage can be developed, thus allowing the articulation of modalities of cultural heritage and the formation of alternative imaginaries. To develop this point, the essay problematizes the heritage concept, examines how governing policies and tourism frameworks define cultural heritage vis-àvis its use in the tourism industry, and discusses the theoretical sources and intellectual legacy of critical ethnography. Cases from Batanes and Marinduque provinces, the Philippines, are reviewed to serve as background. With critical ethnography as a strategic method, the essay suggests that the semiotics of heritage tourism can be broadened and possibilities for social change in Asian tourism and hospitality established.

Popular culture and politics: re-narrating the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute

Narrative, we argue, can (re)construct social reality. Alternative imaginaries of ‘being in the world’ can lead to alternative ways of ‘doing in the world’. We discuss the current dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands as an example. Westphalian logic would have the two countries come to blows, if not go to war, over the Islands. The Westphalian account of the dispute centres on the key principle of sovereignty. But what if we utilized a different imaginary to re-narrate the conflict? We turn to popular culture in both Japan and China as a guide, and juxtapose two anime, Appleseed and Time of Eve, with one Chinese TV drama, Nirvana in Fire. Each of these upends conventional analyses of the Islands dispute and offers alternative conceptions of sovereignty. We conclude by considering the implications of such alternative imaginaries for the study, if not practice, of international relations.

Maps, space and body: connecting mental representations of space to the production of space

This exposition investigates the relationship between maps, space and body. It looks at mental maps — images of the environment that we hold in our memory. It argues that a map we store in our minds is not merely a functional device for navigation, but a system of signs, values and meanings that allow us to re-imagine the space, appropriate it and develop new social practices. The study places mental images inside Lefebvre's triad of social space (Lefebvre, 1991). It suggests that mental images are a manifestation of the third component of the triad, the lived space, which includes alternative imaginations, symbolic values and appropriations of space. The exposition explores this claim via a dataset of 37 mental maps created by Masters-level students at Aalto University in Finland in November 2018. By qualitatively analysing the contents and the morphology of the hand-drawn maps, it traces how the lived space is both passively perceived and actively re-imagined. The main contribution of the exposition is bringing the imagined space to the attention of urban planning professionals. It suggests that the distorted, inconsistent and idiosyncratic mental images are more than a reduced schema of a physical environment. They support alternative re-imagining and catalyse the process of creative appropriation, enabling bottom-up urban transformation.

Transitional Ethics and Aesthetics: Reimagining the Postdisaster City in Christchurch, New Zealand

The 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand, resulted in significant loss of life and injury and in the devastation of much of the center and east of the city. They also shook the foundations, structures, and assumed relations that had previously made the city legible, and in their aftermath the city was marked not only by a mournful sense of living with the hurt but also by coconstructions of new senses of life and place, involving alternative imaginations and performances of place. In this article we focus on how the event of the Christchurch earthquakes has summoned forth previously repressed and little noticed ideas and practices of transitional urbanism. Starting with localized performances of improvised community empowerment, a group of emergent transitional organizations in the city has begun to model new kinds of ethical fidelity to the perceived nature and potential of the earthquake event, especially in terms of transitional experimentation, civic rights of in-commonness, and the performance of aesthetic connection. With the passage of time, transitional organizations have connected these local priorities into wider international networks of transitionalism, acting as imagineers of transnational transitional activity. We argue, therefore, that the irruption of alternative imaginations and performances generated by the earthquakes needs to be understood in terms of both local and transnational assemblages of transition. Not only has fidelity to the event of the Christchurch earthquakes afforded opportunities to reshape collective engagements at the local level but it has also begun to influence transitionist activity in broader global society. Key Words: Christchurch earthquakes, event, fidelity, transitional ethics and aesthetics.

Black Sex in the Quiet

This essay rereads black feminist engagements with silence and the constellation of terms that vibrate around it—invisibility, interiority, domesticity, privacy—to both demonstrate black feminism’s precarious relationship to silence and indicate the ways in which that contention with silence has spurred a fraught move toward confession and publicity. This form of black feminist storytelling—characterized as a bind of black sexual freedom—generates a culture of confession and exposure that reinforces black female fungibility under the guise of sexual liberation and limits alternative conceptions of black erotic freedom. Given that both silence and publicity are fraught spaces for black sexual injury and its redress, this essay posits that a discursive and material space like what Kevin Quashie has theorized as “the quiet” offers black women and the black feminist imagination alternative ways of reading, rehearsing, and enacting black erotic freedom. Extending Quashie’s conceptualization of “the quiet,” the essay develops a conception of “black sex in the quiet,” a hermeneutic that acknowledges the ways in which black fungibility renders every space precarious yet mines the various ways that black subjects carve out alternative imaginaries of black intimacy in the space of the public. Black sex in the quiet is used to read neo-soul artist Erykah Badu’s music video “Other Side of the Game,” an ostensible scene of black cis heteronormative domesticity, for quiet articulations of black erotic freedom.

Art(s) of visibility: resistance and reclamation of university spaces by women students in Delhi

The article uses the narratives of the members of Pinjra Tod, a student-led movement against nigh-time curfews, moral surveillance and other constraint imposed on young women, within the urban Indian universities. The visuals produced by the struggle within the Delhi University are used to understand how the spatial control of women is a historical phenomenon, that constructs the body of women students as partial students and citizens through the use of institutional power mechanisms. The movement provides women an avenue to access the university public space as active political students as opposed to victims in need of protection and provide an alternative imagination of womanhood.

Forced evictions, spatial (un)certainties and the making of exemplary centres in Indonesia

This article considers the relationship between forced evictions and the ‘exemplary centre’ through an examination of three urban waterfront sites in Indonesia in comparative perspective. How is the notion of the ‘exemplary centre’ related to forced evictions and the aspirations of marginalised populations in contemporary cities of Indonesia? What are the chances of asserting alternative ideologies when a capital‐centric and modernist vision of the city as ‘exemplary centre’ dominates official planning paradigms? Competing visions of the ‘exemplary centre’ arise from distinct centres of power, from the state level to the grassroots community level; however, the dominant state vision of urban space is often internalised by those most at risk of displacement by modernist projects. Strategies to thwart forced evictions in riverbank settlements in Jakarta, Solo, and Surabaya offer alternative imaginings of the ‘exemplary centre’ – imaginings that enable the urban poor to visualise their hopes and to overcome the spatial uncertainties that characterise their everyday lives. While these efforts indicate resistance to marginalisation, they also provide a distinct kind of ‘exemplary’ vision based on residents’ own understanding of ideal city living. Concurrently, some alignment to existing ‘exemplary centre’ narratives is traceable in the effort to assert these alternatives.

Reading border-crossing Japanese comics/anime in China: Cultural consumption, fandom, and imagination

Differences in cultural consumption are well recognized as potential forces for changing the cultural identity of consumers. Based on this logic, our hypothesis posits that Chinese readers, who comprise the largest fan community of Japanese comics/anime, are culturally influenced by this foreign product. To examine this hypothesis, we question whether the global values and worldviews of freedom, peaceful coexistence, justice, companionship, and humanity, which are embedded in Japanese comics/anime, influence the values and ideology of Chinese readers. This study was aimed to examine the reading strategies and patterns in legally or illegally imported border-crossing cultural products to assess the potential cultural impact of their consumption on young Chinese readers. Their differences in passion could affect their devotion, their identity, and their worldviews. In this study, focus groups in Japan and China, in-depth interviews, and textual analyses of Japanese comic/amine were conducted to examine the reading, fandom, and cultural impact of comics/anime on Chinese urban youth. The significance of this study is that it explores new models of active reading that affect the long-term shape of and changes in the values and identities of Chinese youth. The findings of this study shed light on whether imported cultural products could transform, change, and dilute the ideologies of the state and nationalism, thereby allowing new and alternative imaginings of values and global citizenship, which are emerging areas of interest in global communication studies.

#NiUnaMenos: Data Activism From the Global South

This article explores the creation of a national index of sexist violence in Argentina in 2016 as an example of data activism in the Global South. Drawing upon a qualitative content analysis of press coverage and activist posts on social media, as well as interviews with activists, it describes the context of the #NiUnaMenos feminist mobilization and the collection “from below” of data on gender violence. This study illustrates how activists in the Global South can appropriate technology and promote new uses that not only respond to their local and immediate needs but also contribute to the production of alternative imaginaries on big data in the longer term. Moreover, the article positions women’s movements as an essential component of current social movements in Latin America.