Imaginative Responses Research Articles

Securing the Future of the Humanities

Abstract A decade ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published The Heart of the Matter report to much acclaim. But what has been the impact of such a high-minded report? In the decade since its publication, we have seen a prevailing anti-humanities rhetoric with significant consequences to the security and persistence of humanistic principles. This article focuses on what many consider to be the most crucial problem of our time, climate change and its consequences, in thinking about how this overwhelming problem offers a rallying point for the insertion of the humanities into practical solutions which require an upending of discrete disciplinary perspectives as well as a bridging of the academic and public divide so that any space between the practice of the humanities and advocacy for social and environmental justice is vastly diminished. It argues for a thorough review of academic reward systems, for a broadening of scholarly definitions, and for a pedagogical focus that demands theory commit to empirical application. Finally, it suggests that we reengage our storytelling prowess with an emphasis on the power of metaphor in order to bolster imaginative response and methodological flexibility that is both cogent and compelling.

Europe’s Leadership Void

Europe’s successful embrace of its geopolitical potential in a multipolar world will require both greater cohesion and an enhanced ability to act globally. Europe’s three major powers – France, Germany and the United Kingdom – have managed to either stave off or recover from right-wing populism, and have dealt competently with the Russia–Ukraine war. But they are currently too riven by internal politics or historical prejudices to take the lead in Europe. Relief from domestic political dysfunction may therefore rest with the European Union itself. Under Ursula von der Leyen’s authoritative leadership, the European Commission has become the most decisive and capable political actor in Europe. This was demonstrated by its imaginative response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and through its comprehensive Russian sanctions regime in 2022. However, only another crisis – such as a second Donald Trump presidential term – is likely to generate the momentum for the commission to re-emerge as the engine for further European integration.

Miraji ke Liye: interview with Julien Columeau

ABSTRACT Mehr Afshan Farooqi interviews Julien Columeau, author of five collections of Urdu fiction, about his novella Miraji ke liye (For Miraji), a fictional account of the infamous Urdu modernist poet. Farooqi contextualizes Miraji within Urdu literature and explores his relationship with French literature, especially Baudelaire and Mallarme. Farooqi’s interview with Columeau explores his fictional ‘evocation’ of Miraji, which draws on Miraji’s own fascination and imaginative response to Baudelaire.

Future ordinaries: Assembling place-based knowledges and literacies in real and imagined harmscapes

This paper explores the role of the everyday in real and imagined responses to climate-changed landscapes emerging from South African and UK-based activities in a project exploring local knowledges and resilience. We analyse photographs and captions created by co-researcher residents in three climate-stressed settlements in South Africa. We then use participant-generated stories created in the UK to explore imagined future landscapes. We demonstrate important commonalities between the real and the imagined, and between Global South and Global North, including three key dynamics to involved in responses to harmscapes of the present that also animate imagined futures: intra-community relations, the development of place and landscape literacies and adaptations. Our process reveals the centrality of the ordinary to both present realities and future imaginaries.

The city of god revisited: Digitalism as a new technological religion

A Religion of Progress has taken shape over the last 21 centuries, from the Enlightenment to present times. It is quite simple to follow a thread from Hermeticism to today, however, several facts have altered its content, therefore, reformulating some of its promises and vision of the world. This paper attempts to evaluate how that Religion of Progress has become a sort of Techno-Hermeticism 2.0. Digital technologies have redefined old hermetic myths into a high-tech religion with dire environmental consequencies. Some of those myths are the resurrection of the bodies, the construction of the City of God, the Adamic universal language and so forth. Now religion must confront the upcoming collapse, however, it is unable to provide satisfactory answers. This goes for all the different churches, from accelerationists (Nick Land) to extinctionists and believers of digital solutionism. That leaves possible imaginative responses to that sociecological crisis without any relevant proposals.

Listening to Europe's migration ‘crisis’: The discursive, affective and imaginative responses of audiences to BBC Radio 4 broadcasts

AbstractWhilst geography has a long tradition of examining geopolitical discourses and imaginaries in media and popular culture, audiences remain understudied. A preoccupation with the site of representation is coupled with a disciplinary bias towards analysing visual media and culture, which obscures alternative ways of knowing, representing and engaging in the world. This paper redresses these imbalances by exploring radio and its capacity to shape audiences' geographical imaginations. An innovative ‘playlist‐diary’ method is used to reveal how listeners hear, interpret and imagine BBC Radio 4 broadcasts on Europe's migration ‘crisis’ between 2014 and 2019; a novel approach which answers calls for geographers to engage with sounds and methodologies of listening, and better understand audience responses to journalistic storytelling on migration. The paper makes a significant conceptual contribution to the field by illustrating how listeners hear broadcasts in discursive, affective and imaginative registers, and by identifying the pivotal role of refugee voices and stories in forging a politics of recognition; that is to say, how and under what conditions radio journalism collapses discourses of ‘us’ and ‘them’, expands imaginative communities of belonging, and leads to instances of identification and connection between listeners and refugees. It therefore pushes beyond research that focuses on discursive and affective invitations in media by uncovering how radio shapes audiences' geographical imaginations around migration and regulates fields of perceptibility, recognition and relatability with people on the move.

“Without Contraries Is No Progression”: William Blake’s Monistic Understanding of Theodicy as Reflected in His Engravings of the Book of Job

In the book of Job, Job is initially described as “perfect and upright,” yet Yahweh allows Satan to inflict terrible suffering on him. From their Deuteronomistic orientation, Job’s comforters insist that Job must have sinned and deserves punishment. If Job is truly innocent, the quandary of theodicy arises because Yahwistic monism views Yahweh as the one and only loving, all powerful God of justice and mercy. However, in his exegesis in his set of engravings of the book, the nineteenth-century poet and artist William Blake viewed Job not as “perfect and upright,” but as wrapped in a self-absorbed bubble of false piety, dedicated to traditional memory and habit. This article selects six of Blake’s engravings and by means of a literary-psychological methodological approach demonstrates how Blake anticipated certain modern exegetical methods in his aim to “justify the ways of God to man.” He claimed the right to use his own imaginative response to the text, rather than rely on the meaning handed down by tradition and memory. The initial divide between heaven and earth is bridged when the youthful Elihu rejects their traditional wisdom, and brings Job to the point where he can experience God as an immanent divine presence. The advance of science, for instance, Darwin’s theory of the origin of the species, and subsequent research in a variety of disciplines has resulted in a new understanding of the inevitability of suffering and evil, and goes some way to validate Blake’s monistic insistence that “without contraries is no progression.”

Democratic Imagination in the University

With an eye on the context of the contemporary university, David Hansen attends in this article to the significance and cultivation of a democratic imagination. While the university is under pressure to put its long-standing educational purposes in service of the global economy and the state, faculty across the various disciplines enjoy considerable latitude to create classroom and other settings that can draw out students’ imaginative response to the world. To illuminate this prospect, Hansen engages the American poet Walt Whitman’s magisterial evocation of democracy, Song of Myself (first published in 1855). Whitman enacts three ‘offices’ of the poet which he shows are at the same time constituents of a democratic imagination: (1) to attend to potentially dynamic aspects of everyday life to which people are typically blind, (2) to project democratic arrangements that contrast with present practices, and (3) to provoke people to remember, which is to say make vivid once again, aims and ideals that have served people well but which are easy to let fall into the shadows in the face of pressure. Hansen suggests that university faculty retain the power to help activate in students, and in themselves, these imaginal proclivities. The results may not be overtly dramatic, but they constitute an ongoing ‘quiet’ revolution – a turning or ‘revolving’ toward genuine educational and democratic values.

Applied imagination.

Imagination is a fundamental human capacity, and to navigate our current global challenges, we need to define and encourage the practice of imagination, or what we term "applied imagination." In this study, we convened a series of focus groups or "virtual salons" to address three guiding questions: (1) How might we define imagination? (2) How might we (or should we) measure imagination? And (3) How might we foster imagination? Our efforts to define applied imagination highlight the crucial role imagination plays in human survival and thriving, the role of social forces in fostering or discouraging imagination, the connection between imagination and faith, and the "dark side" or maladaptive aspects of imagination. The discussions on measuring imagination were quite divided, with some salon participants arguing for the potential of indirect modes for measuring imaginative capacity while others argued that measuring imagination was functionally impossible and morally suspect. Finally, our results around fostering imagination suggest the importance of using play and humor, separating imaginative activities from the everyday, and employing constraints to prompt imaginative responses. We end with a discussion of possible directions for future research and a call to create a transdisciplinary field of imagination studies.

Between art and praxis: Some reflections on psychotherapy

ABSTRACT Psychotherapy is an art: for many practitioners this claim has considerable appeal. My intention here is not to merely defend the claim, but to see how far it can go. To vaguely endorse it feels apologetic; it also implies a facile polarization between art and science – between a (preferred) subjective, qualitative dimension, and a seemingly objective and quantitative domain. It would be wrong to bring art into the equation without some appreciation of the aesthetic experience. In relation to therapy, this requires developing a better grasp of the craft of therapy – of its imaginative response to the sheer elusiveness of mental distress. aesthetics. Psychotherapy is also a form of political praxis. Some practitioners – myself included – would support that claim. Can psychotherapy become a praxis? Can it be, in other words, linked to action, and as such become a political force in the wider, transformational sense of the term? These are among the questions explored in the second part of the current paper.

Displaced Rituals, Replaced Contexts: Reimagining Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in Charles Dibdin's The Younger Brother (1793)

Charles Dibdin (1745–1814) played a central role in David Garrick's epochal Shakespeare Jubilee, held in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769, the biggest media event of the age. He later became a prominent critic of the Jubilee, but his major imaginative response to it in his first and most personal novel, The Younger Brother (1793), has gone unexamined. The ‘Jubilee of Hearts’ built into this novel is an alternative Jubilee, moved several miles up the River Avon to the Warwick area, where it can be divorced from commercial considerations, corrective in its emphases, and serve as a counter-ritual. Needing a theme proportional to Shakespeare's genius, Dibdin chose local harmony as a microcosm of national unity. Dibdin's effort to imagine a Warwickshire Jubilee which has nothing to do with Shakespeare was notably unsuccessful, though: thus Shakespeare is, revealingly, a powerful absent presence at the ‘Jubilee of Hearts’.

Between death and suffering: resolving the gamer’s dilemma

The gamer’s dilemma, initially proposed by Luck (Ethics and Information Technology 11(1):31–36, 2009) posits a moral comparison between in-game acts of murder and in-game acts of paedophilia within single-player videogames. Despite each activity lacking the obvious harms of their real-world equivalents, common intuitions suggest an important difference between them. Some responses to the dilemma suggest that intuitive responses to the two cases are based on important differences between the acts themselves or their social meaning. Others challenge the fundamental assumptions of the dilemma. In this paper, we identify and explore key imaginative and emotional differences in how certain types of in-game violence are experienced by players, consider how these differences factor into the moral lives of players, and use these insights to resolve the dilemma. The view we develop is that the key moral emotion in offensive video gameplay is self-repugnance. This is not repugnance of the act one directs a game character to perform in the game, nor repugnance of the character one plays. It is repugnance of oneself in playing the game. If self-repugnance is a fitting emotional response to playing a videogame, then this is prima facie grounds for thinking it is wrong to play the videogame. Our approach to the gamer’s dilemma is to distinguish the fittingness conditions of self-repugnance from the fittingness conditions of other moral emotions as they pertain to playing videogames. We argue that because of the virtual character of the actions performed in video games, self-repugnance is a fitting response to particular kinds of offensive gameplay. On the other hand, in-game murder is not invariably a fitting ground for self-repugnance. We argue that this difference is grounded in imaginative responses to the harm of death and the harms of profound suffering. Our task is to explain and justify this difference in fittingness conditions and use this to resolve the gamer’s dilemma.

Bleak Reclamation: Anthracite Mining Moods

ABSTRACT In the late 1960s, the hills and valleys of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region came alive via two imaginative responses to the devastation of strip-mined landscapes. Paramount Pictures’ The Molly Maguires and a multiyear Penn State landscape architecture study both attempted to make something new of gouged, abandoned land. This article argues that these reclamation attempts relied upon the attraction of melancholic landscapes. The filmmakers and landscape scholars assumed that places of ruin provoked emotional reactions in viewers and visitors, producing ambiguous moods of pastness. Part contemplation and part sensation, these moods were intended to make people feel their way into new, complex relationships with the land. This article analyzes these projects within scholarly conversations about the historical dimensions of landscape tourism, the narrative framing of Appalachia, and the cultural significance of moods.

Review: The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons, by Carolyn Lesjak

Book Review| March 01 2023 Review: The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons, by Carolyn Lesjak Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 241. $90 cloth; $30 paper. Mark Allison Mark Allison Ohio Wesleyan University Mark Allison is Ben T. Spencer Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is most recently the author of Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain, 1817–1918 (2021) and is currently working on a project on nineteenth-century utopian literature. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Literature (2023) 77 (4): 260–264. https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.77.4.260 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mark Allison; Review: The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons, by Carolyn Lesjak. Nineteenth-Century Literature 1 March 2023; 77 (4): 260–264. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2023.77.4.260 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search In this ambitious and lucid study, Carolyn Lesjak adds her voice to the critics seeking to recuperate that perennially maligned aesthetic modality: nineteenth-century novelistic realism. For Lesjak, the special contemporary salience of realism lies in its imaginative response to the privatization of the commons: those shared-use lands whose enclosure remade the British countryside, curtailed forms of traditional life, and thrust a dispossessed populace into an urban, capitalist modernity. As her title underscores, we, too, live in the “afterlife” of Britain’s enclosure. Not only has the remaking of the country/city nexus and its attendant expropriations been recapitulated around the globe, but the resulting ecological consequences of deforestation and mineral extraction lie near the heart of the contemporary climate crisis. While I have questions about several of its local argumentative moves, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons is a powerful and even inspiring study that demonstrates the continuing... You do not currently have access to this content.

Working Worlds in Neoliberal Japan: Precarity, Imagination, and the “Other-World” Trope

Abstract This article analyzes depictions of work in postmillennial Japanese media, particularly anime and manga, in order to theorize the function of imaginative responses to the social dislocations of neoliberalism. Critical studies of precarity in Japanese popular culture have tended to treat depictions of work as direct representations of actual socioeconomic conditions, overlooking the affective, experiential dimensions of mediated work images and their potential for imagining social relations beyond imposed precarity. The article explores this neglected potential by focusing on the anime and manga trope of isekai (other-world), which depicts life and work in a fantastic environment. These depictions are compared with analogues in live-action films and television during the period of Japan's neoliberalization. Invoking philosophical concepts of social imagination and drawing on autonomist theory for inspiration regarding the visualization of postcapitalist sociality, analysis will demonstrate how their imaginative responses can produce visions of collectivity amenable to postcapitalist projects without explicitly political content. The article hopes to draw out latent capacities within superficially escapist media forms and offer a possible counternarrative to pessimistic discourses about popular culture.

Creativity and partnership

Creativity and partnership

What Data Visualization Reveals: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the Work of Knowledge Production

This essay offers the chronological charts of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894), the 19th-century educator and intellectual, as early examples of how data visualization can reveal a range of forms of knowledge. It challenges the universality of the goals of clarity and efficiency when designing data visualizations, and argues for the value of visualizations that encourage sustained reflection and imaginative response. Drawing from feminist and Black studies scholarship, it confirms how visual knowledge is informed by the social, cultural, and political contexts that surround it, and how an awareness of those contexts can lead to more intentional and more effective visualization design. It concludes with a call to expand the archive of data visualization so that visualization designers, in the present, might be prompted to imagine a wider and more capacious array of visual and interactive forms.

Daughters of jianghu: female heroism in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin and Ash Is Purest White

ABSTRACT In A Touch of Sin (2013) and Ash Is Purest White (2018), Jia Zhangke experiments with a genre cinema that caters to a bigger audience than the director’s previous films have enjoyed. Both films integrate an investigation of pressing social issues with the style of jianghu chuanqi (tales of the extraordinary), foregrounding the spirit of wuxia (martial arts chivalry). Exceptionally, women are the dominant characters of the narratives. This essay analyzes Jia’s feminist appropriation of the wuxia genre and discusses the director’s use of images of legendary nüxia (female knights-errant) to update and revitalize the genre. The rebellious spirit and moral strength of the heroines of the films demonstrate the director’s imaginative responses to social problems in recent years.

A Post-Colonial Re-Reading of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

The imperial project started to influence English national identity as early as the mid-seventeenth century, and the English began to relate their national prominence to their colonial activities, whether in trade or in the acquisition of foreign territories, throughout the eighteenth century. However, England experienced its share of anxieties on the road to imperial "greatness" in its dealings with both other European powers and its native subjects. The British people's tendency to examine themselves and their international achievements with intense pride helped to neutralize those anxieties, much like Crusoe's imagined responses to possible dangers alleviate his fictional forebodings. The English ameliorated their concerns about their international position by becoming an ever more self-referential society, thinking more highly of themselves on account of their contact with colonized peoples, as is epitomized in the personality of Crusoe. To the fictional Crusoe, the experience of his relationship with Friday validates his self-worth and his native culture more than anything else. Robinson Crusoe's affirmation of colonial power through the assertion of his authority over a particular (othered) individual corresponds with, and epitomizes, England's trading and territorial empire during the eighteenth century and the consequent effects on British subjectivity, at a time when the British were struggling to set up a trading empire and challenging other European powers for territory and markets abroad. Robinson Crusoe successfully resolves the insecurities relating to Britain's colonial activities by asserting, through Crusoe's character, the superior nature of the English subject.

The politics of preservation: oral history, socio‐legal studies, and praxis

AbstractOral history is a surprisingly under‐utilized resource in socio‐legal studies. This article explores some of the theoretical and experiential reasons for this deficiency. It begins with an overview of both fields to date, including instances of intellectual collaboration. It then considers tensions between qualitative and oral history interviews under the overlapping themes of preservation, accountability, and agency. The concluding section develops these theoretical arguments in light of ongoing ‘real‐world’ work in transitional justice. I argue in favour of a flexible, pragmatic, and imaginative response to the politics of oral history preservation and a more critical approach to the relationship between oral history, law, and politics. This is designed to encourage the collection and preservation of material that is otherwise side‐stepped, censored, or destroyed. Such an approach would yield benefits not only for the vexed process of ‘dealing with the past’ in post‐conflict societies but for socio‐legal scholarship more generally.