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The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, an intergenerational ethnographic study of young people in contact with youth support teams in a former coal-mining community in Derbyshire, UK, the case is made for understanding how young working class people's experience of education is situated within historical geographies of collectively transmitted affect.
Abstract: At a moment when individualised and de-historicised notions of 'aspiration', 'resilience' and 'wellbeing' are proliferating in policy discourse shaping informal youth support practice, this article argues, instead, for a critically historical focus. In reviewing material from an intergenerational ethnographic study of young people in contact with youth support teams in a former coal-mining community in Derbyshire, UK, the case is made for understanding how young working-class people's experience of education is situated within historical geographies of collectively transmitted affect. In the particular coal-mining locality considered, these classed spatialities of feeling have been shaped through traditions of political, trade union and community resistance and mutual aid established over a 200-year period and culminating in the locally bitterly divided national miners' strike of 1984-85. Beginning from an ethnographic field note, the article outlines how such insubordinate community histories - particularly those imagining a radical reconstitution of society - can be silenced when a collective psycho-social space once redolent with hope becomes a space of ruin as a result of politically orchestrated de-industrialisation. Noticing how this compounds young people's experience of marginalisation and leaves them at once adrift from the 'illegitimate' histories that are their legitimate 'heritage', and at the same time subject to the traumatic affective legacy of those same histories, a critical counter-practice in informal youth support is proposed. Drawing on Blochian readings of Freire, the article calls for a form of intergenerational 'redemptive remembering' - a practice of 'concrete utopia' - capable of recovering 'unspeakable' community histories for a collective remaking of resilience and aspiration beyond the received confines of the neoliberal imaginary.

16 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
23 Apr 2013-Folklore
TL;DR: In this paper, the Sami, the indigenous people of Fenno-Scandinavia, investigate the production of place in digital environments, where place-making practices are approached through the...
Abstract: This article, which focuses on the Sami, the indigenous people of Fenno-Scandinavia, investigates the production of place in digital environments. Place-making practices are approached through the ...

16 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
02 Jan 2017
TL;DR: In the post-Stalinization period, the Imaginary West was a cultural construct that encouraged people to engage with practices that, non-existing or marginal in the west, came to be associated with an allegedly better life existent there as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Although since de-Stalinization in the 1950s, Soviet citizens have witnessed a noticeable influx of elements of western culture in their lives, their imagination of the living standards in the continuum of countries situated behind the western border was based on a usually distorted understanding of certain values and images of that region. Such an imagination encouraged people to engage with practices that, non-existing or marginal in the west, came to be associated with an allegedly better life existent there. The material evidence of such a form of imagination was visible in simple everyday practices, like home decoration, listening to music, and procurement of clothing. Regular imitation of Western life, also known as practicing Imaginary West, defined some markers of a late Soviet generation’s identity. The analysis of such a cultural construct became crucial for the better understanding of identity processes in the Soviet and then post-Soviet region. Scholars, who analysed how the space of ...

16 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Mayhew's survey of London Labour and the London Poor (1851) by identifying throughout the world "two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers." This division also distinguishes, as races, outsider and insider, "the vagabond and the citizen" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Henry Mayhew introduces his survey of London Labour and the London Poor (1851) by identifying throughout the world "two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers." This division also distinguishes, as races, outsider and insider, "the vagabond and the citizen." When he compares the poor in England to "Bushmen," "Lappes," and "Arabian Bedouins," Mayhew effectively locates these "wandering tribes" in imaginary spaces outside the bounds of national life. Mayhew further depicts this vagabond class "preying upon" the nation's citizens, whose movements-as tourists and imperialists, for example-he ignores (1). In Dracula, published in 1897, Bram Stoker complicates Mayhew's social order when he suggests that at the end of the century the modern citizen claimed no settled identity, but a mobility even more extensive than that of Mayhew's "wandering races." The vampire Dracula, who in the novel is identified as primitive and alien and who certainly preys upon citizens, is a wanderer, according to the peculiar logic of the "undead." But those in the novel who eventually defeat Dracula are characterized by unsettled behavior as well. Not quite insiders, they comprise a group of Western citizens who belong within no single nation or social class and who are experienced travellers. What endows the movements of these characters with cultural privilege is their power to capitalize upon mobility, to convert changes of place into opportunities for investment.

16 citations

MonographDOI
31 Jan 2008
TL;DR: This book discusses Boosters, Early Moderns, and the Artful Civic Imaginary, as well as modernism in Public Spaces and Bohemia in Vogue, and Imagining the Watts Towers.
Abstract: Introduction Chapter 1. Boosters, Early Moderns, and the Artful Civic Imaginary Chapter 2. Modernism in Public Spaces Chapter 3. Painting the Town Red Chapter 4. Bohemia in Vogue Chapter 5. Imagining the Watts Towers Conclusion Notes Index Acknowledgments

16 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023563
20221,296
2021145
2020180
2019178
2018199