Imaginative Construction Research Articles

‘Christian notes sound sweetest suffering’: birds, books and textual circulation in Sir John Gibson’s commonplace book (BL Add 37719)

ABSTRACT A growing body of scholarship has worked to recover the vocal dimensions of early modern reading and the effects of aural reading cultures on literary composition. Where these studies have focused on the relationship between the human voice and early modern texts, this article examines how the seventeenth-century royalist prisoner Sir John Gibson deploys early modern ideas about birds and birdsong as he seeks consolation through the material and textual processes of literary composition, manuscript compilation, and epistolary exchange. These efforts are evident in his physical and imaginative construction of his miscellany (BL Add 37719) as possessing bird-like capacities for movement and communication. While Gibson’s miscellany does draw on familiar seventeenth-century ideas about music and the human voice, I argue that his invocations of birds and birdsong produce intriguing and powerful claims for the ways written texts can extend the capabilities of the human voice and body.

“Pearl Rush” and the Construction of Australian Imagination of Aru Islands, 1869-1937

In the early 20th century, the Aru Islands emerged as an economic centre in Eastern Indonesia’s lesser known region. Australian pearling industry entry into its maritime zone created the “Pearl Rush”. This western-mode of natural exploitation shaped Aru’s conception as a thriving pearling centre. This image of Aru was therefore a direct result of a constructed imagination reinforced by the active Australian pearling zone. Movement of Australian mariners and pearling fleets influenced the public views of the region, as reflected in the Australian newspapers and popular magazines. Such views connected the Aru Islands’ image into the greater “Pearl Zone” of North and Western Australian cities. This paper examines how Australia’s views of Aru’s natural resources impacted and shaped the understanding of the islands’ commercial role and it will highlight the role of the pearling industry in creating the allure of imagined valuable resources, which paved the way for its exploitation.

Critical Religion Takes a Punch: Notes on a Scholarly Skirmish

Abstract In this reply to the article “Can Critical Religion Play by Its Own Rules? Why There Must Be More Ways to Be ‘Critical’ in the Study of Religion” by Galen Watts and Sharday Mosurinjohn (2022), I take exception to the authors’ criticisms. I call attention to Watts’ and Mosurinjohn’s implication that critical religion enables racism, their imaginary construction of a methodological ‘school’ with rigid ‘rules,’ and their simplistic dismissal of Foucault’s approach to discourse analysis. I then suggest that the suspension of reified categories in Religious Studies opens up promising avenues for theory and research.

Between Reality and Imagination an in-depth Analysis of Dreams

Abstract: Dreams have intrigued and fascinated humans for centuries, serving as a unique window into the human mind.It revolves around understanding how thehuman mind navigates the complex interplay between the real world and imaginative constructs within the realm ofdreams. Dreams are a unique psychological phenomenon where individuals experience a wide array of scenarios, emotions, and situations that often blur the boundaries between what isreal and what is a product of the imagination. This research paper exploresthe multifaceted nature of dreams, aimingto delve into the biological, psychological, and cultural dimensions of this phenomenon. By examining the historicalsignificance, the science of dreaming, Freudian and Jungian dream theories, contemporary perspectives, and cultural variations, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of dreams and their importance in understanding humanconsciousness.

Ființele ficționale: ce sunt și la ce folosesc

My paper problematizes the (non)existence of the fictional beings, addressing a series of important theoretical questions and comparing some relevant (realist / antirealist) answers archived by the modern and contemporary conceptual history. I have examined contrastive philosophical perspectives that define the ontological condition of fictional beings, in an attempt to represent the specific difference of these imaginative constructs and their experiential roles. The argumentative stake of my concise research is to prove that, in the coordinates of the imaginative worlds, fictional beings, their behavior, language, emotions, intentions, help us „read” and interpret real life - they are cognitive tools of exceptional value.

The celestial ferry: Elena Shvarts’s ekphrasis as the sum of readerly experience

The article analyzes Elena Shvarts's late poem "Chinese Toy", where the poet describes the Kunstkamera exhibit in an unusual way, turning the mechanical principles of the ship motion and Chinese mythological imagery into a tool for blurring the boundaries between conception and givenness. The aim is to find how this magical realism, which reconceptualizes reading, is embedded in the understanding of reading that Elena Shvarts offers in the post-Soviet period of her work. With methodological reference to classical semiotic positions, Lotman's theory of oppositions and Jakobson's theory of shifters, it is ascertained that we are facing a reverse ekphrasis: the artifact itself demonstrates the principles of the animation of the static. Turning to Chinese mythology and Chinese mechanics allows us to reject the Western understanding of ekphrasis as a situative enlivening of the depicted and to accept the reinvention of cosmogony in China, which is expressed in the artifact mentioned in the poem. Shvarts performs a reduction of the sublime experience in order to overcome the persistent ideas about reading as constructive imagination and to show alternative mechanisms of reading. The new way of reading, implied by the poem, turns out to be a metacriticism of the former figure of the reader as a flaneur, an observer of the various fatal mechanics of the universe. Both in the lyrics and prose of the late Shvarts, a unified mechanics of the universe appears, in relation to which the reader's experience looks like a game, and the reader's imaginary is one of the toys in this game.

La migración desde la mirada de las infancias. Caso Michoacán

This article analyzes the ways in which children express and understand transnational migration from their social, family and cultural contexts; identifying resilience mechanisms of his family through the drawings recovered in some municipalities of the State of Michoacán. The systematization of the experience of the “Art, Culture and Migration” workshop was – through an ethnographic vision – in two senses: first, interpreting what childhoods build through community imaginaries related to transnational migration, with a focus on agency in childhoods and family dynamics; and the second, the artistic creations were qualitatively analyzed, from the analysis of the expression of emotion and the imaginary construction of what they understand by “migration” in their family, community and social contexts, from their own capacity for agency, managing to observe iconic aspects of migration and its emotions.

高中数学思维型课堂直观想象的建构方案

高中数学思维型课堂直观想象的建构方案

Decolonizing Ableist Pedagogy

AbstractHow can someone born without a privileged language and not educated in a privileged educational institution engage in decolonization? This is a very relevant question for most people who live in the context of the global South. This paper proposes a constructive imagination to decolonize ableist pedagogy through feminist disability analysis. I argue that colonial pedagogy is inherently ableist. This paper is situated in an anti‐ableist and anti‐patriarchal framework, unveiling the normate culture and patriarchal‐colonial logic. However, the main source of analysis and epistemological tool is my body and experience as an Indonesian woman living with a disability. In trying to decolonize pedagogy, the experience of the body becomes more important than forming a new abstract theory of decoloniality. This paper proposes decolonizing ableist pedagogy as a communal work which requires examining colonial language and the binary thinking of body and mind through delinking the colonial space and crippling the colonial time. Based on this awareness, the decolonialization of ableist pedagogy is as imperative as the decolonialization of church mission.

Kierkegaard’s account of thought experiment: a method of variation

ABSTRACT I argue that Kierkegaard has an account of thought experiment. While his contemporary Ørsted’s contributions to the early history of the concept of ‘thought experiment’ have been recently acknowledged, Kierkegaard’s contributions remain largely unrecognized. I argue that Kierkegaard’s method of ‘imaginary construction’ [Tanke-Experiment] aims at identifying underlying invariants in objects of experience. I outline similarities between Ørsted’s pursuit of invariants in the sciences and Kierkegaard’s fictional variations in Repetition. One implication is that Kierkegaard’s view is more scientific and methodological than is standardly thought by Kierkegaard scholars, who more commonly treat imaginary construction as a literary device. A further implication is that Kierkegaard, like Ørsted, is interested in the success or failure of mental acts, rather than (or in addition to) practical action, as is more standardly associated with Kierkegaard. One original development, beyond what Kierkegaard inherits from Ørsted, is the role of thought experiments as exceptions. An exception is a case that falls outside a rule without breaking it. Exceptions can neither establish a rule nor refute its necessity; however, they turn attention to relevant principles and further determine their content. I highlight similarities between Ørsted’s account of thought experiments and Kierkegaard’s as a method of variation.

Memories of Home: The Belfast Films of Mark Cousins and Kenneth Branagh

This article discusses Mark Cousin’s I Am Belfast (2015) and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (2022) as autobiographical cinema. While acknowledging the multiple differences between each film, I argue that they also share many common themes and motifs. These include a determination to depict Belfast as a city shaped as much by a down-to-earth working class identified by their sense of community as by its official history of the Troubles. Both celebrate friendships across the religious divide, and both share a utopian sensibility, expressed as much through aesthetics as narrative devices. My argument centres on the imaginative construction of Belfast in both films, while also drawing attention to how devices, such as the inclusion of songs by Van Morrison, open the works up to a wider process of exilic identity construction. I also consider the issue of ‘cultural Protestantism’ as evidenced in Branagh’s film and how cinema’s own history intersects with the personal histories of both film-makers.

Cities and Territorial Brand in The Metaverse: The Metaverse SEOUL Case

Cities involve units of time and space, being part of historical, social, economic, cultural, and tourist imaginary constructions. The goal is to understand how the territorial brand, based on regional development theories, is being used in the metaverse city of Seoul, South Korea. The method used was a case study associated with bibliographic and documentary research, using a protocol with four analytical categories. The main results referred to a metaverse territorial-regional brand, bringing discussions about a new geographical-virtual-immersive metaverse scale. It also addressed the use of recognition and competitiveness strategies between interactive-immersive territories. The conclusion confirms that Seoul’s metaverse territorial-regional brand is strategically divided into three situations: (1) For city marketing purposes, positioning it as the first metaverse global city; (2) in city branding to strengthen the reputation and identity of the territory; and (3) to drive the transformation of physical territory with urban revitalization projects from the metaverse environment. Moreover, it serves Metaverse Seoul as an interactive and immersive field laboratory in virtual reality.

Negotiating spaces of fear in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s migrant writing

This article examines how dystopic Moroccan urban societies generate a culture of fear that produces the fantasy of fleeing and how this fear sustains the dynamic acts of nomadism. It deploys postcolonial utopianism and psycholinguistics to study how Ben Jelloun’s ‘postmodern nomads’ and exilic subjects negotiate the spaces of fear in Labyrinthe des sentiments and Partir. The essay goes further to show how these psychosocially alienated characters use attitudinal lexemes to indexicate the fearful episodic memories of their original and foster loci. In both novels, repressed fear remains an essential catalysing element for the psycholinguistic construction of the utopian imagination for the desired spaces of Europe. Social dreaming is, nevertheless, the cord that binds illusion with reality and transforms the postcolonial subject’s fear into faith for a better tomorrow. The study concludes that Ben Jelloun’s migrant writing illustrates migrant and exilic subjects who negotiate all spaces of fear that are gendered, transcultural and transnational.

15Theatre and Performance

Abstract It’s a cliché, of course, to open an annual review by pointing out how the texts under discussion reflect our contemporary moment. And none of the books reviewed here are modish responses to passing scholarly fads. All speak first and foremost to concerns located at the very heart of the theatre medium itself: the imaginative construction of alternative shared worlds, and the exploration of our hopes and fears around modes of interpersonal touch and intimacy. So, forgive me just one brief reflection on how it is surely no coincidence that the books that intervene most excitingly and meaningfully in the scholarly field this year are also those that speak to some of the most pressing anxieties and desires in the broader world as well, in the wake of pandemic contagion, the #MeToo movement, a cost-of-living crisis, and continued dystopic crises in both the academic industry and in national and global politics. The first section of this chapter, ‘Utopia’, reviews three monographs that discuss the intersections between theatre, concepts of utopia and utopian thinking: Siân Adiseshiah’s Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre, Selina’s Busby’s Applied Theatre: A Pedagogy of Utopia and Ryan Claycomb’s In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation. The second section, ‘Touch and Intimacy’, reviews two books that cast an eye on questions of touch and intimacy onstage, from a contemporary practice-based and historical scholarly perspective respectively: Supporting Staged Intimacy: A Practical Guide for Theatre Creatives, Managers, and Crew, co-authored by Alexis Black and Tina M. Newhauser, and Alex MacConochie’s Staging Touch in Shakespeare’s England.

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke: An Unfinished Reading of Jeffrey Stewart's Troubled Biography

Abstract Jeffrey C. Stewart's book on Alain Locke is an unsuccessful endeavor. Stewart characterizes his book as a biography, leading the reader to expect an illuminating, accurate, and truthful account of Locke's life based on and disciplined by adherence to credible evidence and standards of scholarship. However, the life of Locke that Stewart recounts is, to a large extent, an imaginary construction that draws on but ventures far beyond the documentary evidence in narrating Locke's life, his “inner life” especially. Consequently, the chapters have the character of literary fiction—biographical fiction—seemingly plausible at times. Furthermore, numerous scholarly shortcomings and egregious misreadings and misrepresentations of W. E. B. Du Bois add to the book's failings. After reading twenty-eight of Stewart's forty-four chapters and “Epilogue,” this writer refused to suffer Stewart's book any further and ended his reading, his trust exhausted.

Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

Down with This Sort of Thing: Seth Heringer and the End of the Historical-Critical Method

Combinatorial Language parent-report Scores Differ Significantly Between Typically Developing Children and Those with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Prefrontal synthesis (PFS) is a component of constructive imagination. It is defined as the process of mentally juxtaposing objects into novel combinations. For example, to comprehend the instruction "put the cat under the dog and above the monkey," it is necessary to use PFS in order to correctly determine the spatial arrangement of the cat, dog, and monkey with relation to one another. The acquisition of PFS hinges on the use of combinatorial language during early childhood development. Accordingly, children with developmental delays exhibit a deficit in PFS, and frequent assessments are recommended for such individuals. In 2018, we developed the Mental Synthesis Evaluation Checklist (MSEC), a parent-reported evaluation designed to assess PFS and combinatorial language comprehension. In this manuscript we use MSEC to identify differences in combinatorial language acquisition between ASD (N = 29,138) and neurotypical (N = 111) children. Results emphasize the utility of the MSEC in distinguishing language deficits in ASD from typical development as early as 2 years of age (p < 0.0001).

Crisi. Una conversazione interdisciplinare su una parola chiave della nostra congiuntura storica

This collaborative essay aims to provide a theoretical and discursive background to the thematic issue of Languages Cultures Mediation – LCM devoted to exploring crisis/crises. It consists, therefore, of two parts. The first one starts with a few considerations on the current conjuncture, in which “crisis” stands out as a powerful keyword which is ubiquitous across mainstream communication and public debate. It continues by foregrounding some thoughts on the definitions of this term and its deceptive intuitiveness, concurring to highlight some slippages and shifts in its usage and meanings over time. Finally, it attempts to stylize some assumptions, premises, perspectives and theoretical issues concerning the conceptualization of crisis and how to interpret it, including narratives and memory work. The second part of the essay provides a review and a discussion of theoretical perspectives and interpretive tools for addressing more specifically the category of crisis as a discursive, affective and imaginative construction. In the process, it engages in a conversation with some recent analytical approaches to crisis pertaining, mostly, to the conceptual and ideological arenas of linguistics, critical discourse analysis, narrative and metaphor studies, political communication.

FORCED DISPLACEMENT ANALYSIS OF THE VOICES OF CHILDREN RESIDING IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ATLÁNTICO, COLOMBIA

Forced displacement is a victimizing event that emerges as a social phenomenon of war, causing great changes in the lives of those who suffered it and of the new generations of the victims' families. The article, which is the result of a qualitative research project, analyzes forced displacement from the voices of children between 10 and 13 years old, living in a municipality of the Department of Atlantic Colombia, which receives this population. Direct observation and semi-structured interviews were used to collect information. As an analysis tool, the ATLAS.ti program was used, which allows the identification of semantic networks that relate to emerging categories. The results indicate relationships between categories such as forced displacement, violence, family, community, conflict resolution and dialog. The study shows a pattern of behavior unidentified in the research of the same type, in which the perception of the overt violence of forced displacement is projected onto the new external agents in the new place of residence, i.e., there is an imaginary construction of violence per se.

THE The Virtuosity of Traditional Africa and the Plasticity of Its Affects: The Cross-Cultural Fertilization of “Yela” in the Western Sahel and Savanah

Throughout the poetic image and imaginative construction of the self, the Yela embodies a protrusive source of vindication within the intellective and creative process of understanding become an object of perception. From an ingenuous beget to a more compound whole of a convention of representation and the association of experience, the Yela inside the Puular language becomes a structural material. Thus, the constituent of conservative imagery and the colonialist dynamic influences frame an innovative eccentric variety that appraises the formation of reality, memory, and symbol. Therefore, the domain of Yela through its cultural and artistic body, and within its existing essentiality of Gaandal and Demngal overtakes the principles of basic linguistics and the colonialist conventional perception of productivity. In effect, the Yela art through the all-encompassing relation of the Puular language with the whole performance of time and space, emphasizes on a cosmopolitan wholesome recombination, settlement and re-appropriation of material imagination and objective reality of intellection. The foundation of intellectual and artistic image, and imaginative expression, the corresponding inventiveness of the Yela art, and the musical nationalism arrange move beyond comatose understanding. Therefore, the commitment of this article underlines the question of the effective temperature of the Yela indigenous value of imagination, and its transformative experience as regard language, sociolinguistic and ecological reflectivity, and then its emphasis on its contemporary stylistic compass of performance.