Utopian Performatives and the Social Imaginary: Toward a New Philosophy of Drama/Theater Education

Chapter 12, “Commentary: Personalization,” discusses the process of personalization, based on the portraits presented in Chapters 8–11. Personalization is not just a matter of individual variation; it is a form of active engagement through which individuals endow imaginaries with personal meanings and refract the imaginary through their own experiences. The portraits illustrate how the social imaginary of childrearing and self-esteem entered into dialogue with the complex realities of people’s lives. Parents’ ability to implement their childrearing goals was constrained and enabled by their past experiences and by socioeconomic conditions. The individual children were developing different strategies of self-evaluation, different expectations about how affirming the world would be, and different self-defining interests, and their self-making varied, depending on the situation. Some children received diagnoses of low self-esteem as early as preschool.

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Child-Affirming Artifacts

10.1093/oso/9780199959723.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Peggy J. Miller ◽

Grace E. Cho

Keyword(s):

Self Esteem ◽

Consumer Products ◽

Social Imaginary ◽

Children's Books ◽

The Social ◽

Children’S Homes ◽

Tv Shows ◽

Vygotskian Theory ◽

Electronic Games ◽

Inherent Worth

Chapter 7, “Child-Affirming Artifacts,” uses ideas from Vygotskian theory to describe the child-affirming artifacts that populated children’s homes. Some artifacts were widely distributed consumer products. Children interacted with toys and electronic games that dispensed praise. Children’s books and TV shows, marketed as promoting children’s self-esteem, featured characters who were celebrated for their achievements, individuality, inherent worth, and potential. Several children loved Blue’s Clues, a show whose star constantly praised its characters and audience. These consumer products instantiated the same self-enhancing practices that parents believed fostered children’s self-esteem, thereby amplifying the social imaginary. This chapter also describes personalized, handmade artifacts designed by the families to celebrate their children. Photos of the children and artwork by children were on display in every household, and some adults created original homages to their children, which prompted commentary and stories that extolled the children’s achievements and reminded them how much they were loved and cherished.

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All Aboard the Louis Vuitton Train!

Pólemos ◽

10.1515/pol-2016-0010 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

pp. 179-195

Author(s):

Leif Dahlberg

Keyword(s):

Body Politic ◽

The Body ◽

Social Imaginary ◽

The Social ◽

Continuous Running

Abstract The article discusses fashion advertising as a means to access and understand contemporary social imaginary significations of the body politic, focusing on an advertising for Louis Vuitton. The article suggest that one can read advertising as a form of continuous, running commentary that society makes of itself, and through which one can unearth the social imaginary. The article finds a plethora of meanings in the selected advertising for Louis Vuitton, but the central finding is that the fashion advertising represents community as an absence of community; in other words as a deficit that the brand somehow is able to rectify.

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