Topic
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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TL;DR: The authors argue that globalization is not simply a concept describing the world but rather an imaginary; a mental practice which renders multiple, often competing, social relationships into a meaningful, coherent whole.
Abstract: Research Highlights and Abstract
Globalization and US higher education.
Theorizing the global imaginary (Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger).
Althusser and the imaginary.
Universities and the production of knowledge.
I argue that �globalization� is not simply a concept describing the world but rather an imaginary; a mental practice which renders multiple, often competing, social relationships into a meaningful, coherent whole. While some scholars have made similar arguments, none has laid out a theoretically rigorous understanding of the global imaginary. I first draw upon the work of Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger to better understand globalization as an imaginary, but find their work unable to explain how the global imaginary is produced. To ameliorate this deficiency, I turn to the work of Louis Althusser to theorize globalization as socially produced within particular material apparatuses that organize daily practices. I conclude by applying this theory to examine how the apparatus of the US university has transformed from an institution designed to produce a national imaginary to one producing the global imaginary.
40 citations
TL;DR: This paper used the ideas of social imaginary and political myth to understand the popular appeal of the idea of civilizational conflict, and suggested that this appeal is unlikely to be punctured by theoretical arguments alone, but by an equally plausible political narrative located in an alternative social imaginary, acquired through cosmopolitan le...
Abstract: In recent years, the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’, first put forward by Samuel Huntington (1996), has been widely used to explain the contemporary dynamics of geo‐political conflict. It has been argued that the fundamental source of conflict is no longer primarily ideological, or even economic, but cultural. Despite many trenchant and largely debilitating academic critiques of Huntington's argument, the popular appeal of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis remains undiminished. In many parts of the world, the binary it describes is often taken to be self‐evident, especially after the tragic events of September 11. This paper uses the ideas of ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2004) and ‘political myth’ (Blumenberg, 1984) to understand the popular appeal of the idea of civilizational conflict, and suggests that this appeal is unlikely to be punctured by theoretical arguments alone, but by an equally plausible political narrative located in an alternative social imaginary, acquired through cosmopolitan le...
40 citations
TL;DR: The authors analyzed the free writings of US middle school students that were collected at three schools with different community environments (rural, urban, and suburban) and identified the features and styles of the discourse(s) that occur in the students' writings, examined the ways the discourse of Othering and Orientalism operate in these texts, and explored the specificity of contemporary American identity formation in relation to the imaginary boundary between Japan (“them”) and the United States (”us”).
Abstract: This study critically examines the discourses of Japan as employed by young people in the United States. In particular, it analyses the free writings of US middle school students that were collected at three schools with different community environments (rural, urban, and suburban). The study identifies the features and styles of the discourse(s) that occur in the students' writings, examines the ways the discourse of Othering and Orientalism operate in these texts, and explores the specificity of contemporary American identity formation in relation to the imaginary boundary between Japan (“them”) and the United States (“us”).
40 citations
40 citations
25 Aug 2016
TL;DR: Place ethnography as discussed by the authors is a methodological framework that blends ethnographic and historic research with a range of disciplinary techniques in order to study place, where place is defined as a describable location characterized by a shifting confluence of historical, material, political, cultural, economic, built, sensed and imagined qualities.
Abstract: “Place for me is the locus of desire,” writes Lucy Lippard in the opening to Lure of the Local (1997). This research project is about place. Two distinct sets of scholarship on place emerged in the 1970s and the 1990s. A third wave of place scholarship is evident today. Coming initially from geography and anthropology, the study of place is now ubiquitous across fields—in history, cultural studies, architecture, planning, health sciences, art and other disciplines. Despite the sustained interest in the study of place, one of the hallmarks of place is the ranging and contested contours of what place means. Place is defined, for the purposes of this study, as a describable location characterized by a shifting confluence of historical, material, political, cultural, economic, built, sensed and imagined qualities. There are three distinct goals in this research project. First, this research project seeks to explore how place has been theorized, imagined, and understood. Second, this research project is an inquiry into how place can be studied. To these ends, I name, define, and refine a method I call place ethnography. Place ethnography is a methodological framework that blends ethnographic and historic research with a range of disciplinary techniques in order to study place. I develop several concepts in this project. These include the idea of a place imaginary, defined as a dominant place perception, the
40 citations