scholarly journals Characterizing Social Imaginaries and Self-Disclosures of Dissonance in Online Conspiracy Discussion Communities

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (CSCW2) ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Shruti Phadke ◽  
Mattia Samory ◽  
Tanushree Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Social Imaginaries

SOUTH AFRICA IN THE CINEMATIC IMAGINARY: THE STORY OF A WHITE YOUTH IN SKIN

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-178
Author(s):  
Khatija Bibi Khan
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Black People ◽  
White Youth ◽  
Multiple Selves ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Rapid Production ◽  
New Critics ◽  
Good Number

The rapid production of films of diversity in post-1994 South Africa has unfortunately not been matched by critical works on film. Part of the reason is that some of the films recycle old themes that celebrate the worst in black people. Another possible reason could be that a good number of films wallow in personality praise, and certainly of Mandela, especially after his demise. Despite these problems of film criticism in post-1994 South Africa, it appears that some new critics have not felt compelled to waste their energy on analysing the Bantustan film – a kind of film that was made for black people by the apartheid system but has re-surfaced after 1994 in different ways. The patent lack of more critical works on film that engages the identities and social imaginaries of young and white South Africans is partly addressed in SKIN – a film that registers the mental growth and spiritual development of Sandra’s multiple selves. This article argues that SKIN portrays the racial neurosis of the apartheid system; and the question of identity affecting young white youths during and after apartheid is experienced at the racial, gender and sex levels.

Blocked by YouTube? Unseen digital intermediaries for social imaginaries in the Asia Pacific

2021 ◽  
pp. 1329878X2110179
Author(s):  
Jonathon Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Online Community ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
User Engagement ◽  
Asia Pacific Region ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Content Sharing ◽  
Enterprise Education ◽  
Commercial Enterprise ◽  
Asian Pacific

YouTube is one of the most utilised online content sharing sites, enabling commercial enterprise, education opportunities, and facilities for vernacular creativity. Its user engagement demonstrates online community development; alongside its use as a distribution platform to monetise one’s branded self. However, as a subset of Alphabet Incorporated, its access is often restricted by governments of Asian Pacific countries. This research describes how countries that have banned YouTube still have exceptionally strong online communities, bringing into question the sorts of augmentations used by its participants. This article focuses on digital intermediation strategies, specifically the DIY approach of community building through the use of unseen infrastructures. This comparative study of YouTube channels in several Asia Pacific countries highlights the techniques that bypass limiting infrastructures to boost online community activity. The results demonstrate digital intermediation provides unique opportunities for key agents to contribute to strengthening social imaginaries within the Asia Pacific region.

scholarly journals Futures of sustainability: Perspectives on social imaginaries and social transformation. A comment on Frank Adloff and Sighard Neckel’s research program

2021 ◽  
pp. 053901842199956
Author(s):  
Gerard Delanty
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Research Program ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Future ◽  
And Control

This essay is a comment on the research program launched by Frank Adloff and Sighard Neckel. My comment is specifically focused on their research agenda as outlined in their trend-setting article, ‘Futures of sustainability as modernization, transformation, and control: A conceptual framework’. The comment is also addressed more generally to the research program of the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies ‘Futures of Sustainability’. I raise three issues: the first relates to the very idea of the future; the second concerns the notion of social imaginaries and the third question is focused on the idea of social transformation.

Russia’s ‘fortresses of solitude’: Social imaginaries of loneliness after the fall of the USSR

2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-309
Author(s):  
Sergei Akopov
Keyword(s):  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Russian Government ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Specific Focus

Based on the distinction between three approaches to loneliness, and the development of the phenomenological and existential framework of loneliness studies, this article explores Russia’s discourse of national loneliness on three levels: a) the level of the official discourse of the Russian government; b) the level of political and philosophical concepts; and c) the level of popular media and cinema (with a specific focus on a case-study of the post-Soviet Russian blockbuster film Brother and its sequel, Brother 2). In this article I concentrate on the particular experiences of loneliness and their interpretations in Russia after the fall of the USSR. The case of the fall of the USSR has shown that social and political exploitations of different forms of national loneliness can become the flip side of the doctrine of autonomy, equal individual rights and freedom from authoritarian rule. This should be considered and never disregarded within our analysis of the contours and new transformations of emerging hegemonic discourses, including the different forms of nationalism in Russia, and in a wider cross-cultural perspective.

Modern Social Imaginaries

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Social Imaginaries

“Occupying” Our Social Imagination: The Necessity of Utopian Discourses in an Anti-Utopian Age

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 152-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Webb
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political System ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Willful Blindness ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
Occupy Movements

AbstractWe are in the depths of multiple catastrophes that Western society is seemingly unwilling and unable to address: growing inequalities between the rich and the poor, a willful blindness to climate change, and a political system mired in uncompromising and ever increasing extremism. However, there are no reality transcending dialogues, no new social imaginaries to drive change—our own dystopic reality has no utopian response. The greatest importance that the Occupy movements may play in spurring social change and revolution is their success at bringing radical discourses into mainstream society. Occupy not only occupied fixed public locations, but also occupied our social imagination.

scholarly journals Social imaginaries and the theory of the normative utterance

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (10) ◽  
pp. 1045-1071
Author(s):  
Meili Steele
Keyword(s):  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Normative Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Propositional Form

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political theories in developing their basic normative concepts and principles, providing an alternative to the oscillation between the constructivism and the realism. Theorists of the imaginary have enabled us to think about normatively charged collective imaginaries as logically prior to the construction of normative principles. What theorists of the imaginary have not done is make specific connections between the ontological background of social imaginaries and the normative utterance. This lacuna has left them vulnerable to the charges of ‘normative deficit’ and vagueness that Habermas and others famously make against philosophies of ‘world disclosure’. This article develops a conception of the normative utterance that enables us to reason through social imaginaries. In such reasoning, claims are not expressed in the propositional form of the Rawlsian or Habermasian justification, but through a complex engagement with the worldhood that informs normative judgements.

scholarly journals From the Crisis of Secularism to the Predicament of Post-Secularism

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-412
Author(s):  
Michael Staudigl
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Religious Imagination ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Late Modern ◽  
Inherent Ambiguity ◽  
Productive Role

Abstract This article offers an interpretation of late modern social imaginaries and their relationship to religion and violence. I hypothesize that the transition from the ‘secular age’ to a so-called ‘post-secular constellation’ calls on us to critically reconsider the modern trope that all too unambiguously ties religion and violence together. Discussing the fault lines of a secularist modernity spinning out of control today on various fronts, I argue that the narrative semantics of the so-called ‘return of religion’ is frequently adopted as an imaginative catalyst for confronting these contemporary discontents – for better and worse. In linking recent work on ‘social imaginaries’ with Paul Ricœur’s discussion of the productive role of imagination in social life, I then explore the transformative potential of religious imagination in its inherent ambiguity. In conclusion I demonstrate that this quality involves a poietic license to start all over, one which can be used to expose both the violence of our beloved political ideals of freedom and sovereignty, as well as their repercussions on religious practice.

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