Modern Social Imaginaries (Public Planet Books)

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Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. 2010. The Strong Program. Origins, Achievements, Prospects. In Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff, and Ming-Cheng Lo, 13–24. London/New York: Routledge. Marcus, George E. (1995-04-01). Technoscientific Imaginaries: Conversations, Profiles, and Memoirs. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226504445. Binder, Werner. 2010. Violence, Communication and Imagination. Pre-modern, Totalitarian and Liberal-Democratic Torture. In Totalitarian Communication. Hierarchies, Codes and Messages, ed. Kirill Postoutenko, 217–247. Bielefeld: transcript.

Binder, Werner. 2013. Abu Ghraib und die Folgen. Ein Skandal als ikonische Wende im Krieg gegen den Terror. Bielefeld: transcript. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1963. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim. " Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea." Minerva 47, no. 2 (June 1, 2009): 119-146. The concept of social imaginaries belongs to the family of the imagination. With this in mind, the journal will also strive to offer a forum for philosophical debates on the nature of the imagination, understood in its various modes: creative and recreative, productive and reproductive, social and individual, etc. The journal is guided by the goal to reflect on the human condition, in past, present, and future societies and constellations, without limiting itself to a specific geographical or sociocultural region. The International Journal of Social Imaginaries will include in its focal range discussions of historical ruptures in societal meaning (as with the emergence of early democracy and capitalist society), and also will discuss critical contemporary shifts in meaning-making, related to (post-)democracy and populism, globalized capitalism, environmentalism, terrorism and human rights, and religion. This involves debates concerning specific concrete issues such as the current pandemic or police brutality or media portrayal of such phenomena and political polarization through social media, among others, and their effects on how we view our relationships to the social and natural environment. The International Journal of Social Imaginaries wants to demonstrate that researching social imaginaries is crucial in allowing for a comprehensive and rigorous understanding of existing collective systems of meaning in—and across—societies as well as of shifting and newly emerging meanings. Such understanding is even more important in distinctive periods in which taken-for-granted meanings are in a state of rapid transformation (as arguably is occurring in current times).

Binder, Werner. 2017. The Drama of Politics: Jeffrey Alexander’s Liberal Sociology of Political Performances. Thesis Eleven 142(1):112–129. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513617727904. Frank, Thomas, Albrecht Koschorke, Susanne Lüdemann, and Ethel Matala de Mazza. 2002. Des Kaisers neue Kleider: über das Imaginäre politischer Herrschaft; Texte, Bilder, Lektüren. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Blyth, J. (1983). English university adult education 1908–1958: The unique tradition. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith. 2003. The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology. Elements of a Structural Hermeneutics. In The Meanings of Social Life. A Cultural Sociology, ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander, 11–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durkheim, Émile. 1969. Individualism and the Intellectuals. Political Studies 17:19–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1969.tb00622.x. The lifeworld is a different matter. I tend to think that it was a transitional concept, and that we can now do without it. Husserl did not invent it, but his use of it became the main inspiration for later reformulations, sometimes with a very different thrust (think of the interpretation of the lifeworld in Habermas’s theory of communicative action). Husserl was trying to build a bridge between transcendental phenomenology and history; I think that this problem has now been neutralized – on the one hand by the post-transcendental turn of phenomenology and the focus on the world, on the other by Castoriadis’s elucidation of the social-historical. In short, we now have conceptual resources that make the lifeworld redundant. Iser, Wolfgang. 1993. The Fictive and the Imaginary. Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

For John Thompson, the social imaginary is "the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life". [1] Habermas, Jürgen, ed. 1985. Observations on the Spiritual Situation of the Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Steger, Manfred B.; James, Paul (2013). " 'Levels of Subjective Globalization: Ideologies, Imaginaries, Ontologies' ". Perspectives on Global Development and Technology. 12 (1–2): 17–40. doi: 10.1163/15691497-12341240. Taylor C (2011) Dilemmas and connections: selected essays. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

Krummel, John W.M. 2016. Introduction to Miki Kiyoshi and his Logic of the Imagination. Social Imaginaries 2(1):13–24. https://doi.org/10.5840/si2016212. In sum, The International Journal of Social Imaginaries aims to pursue intersecting debates on forms of meaning, knowledge and truth as they have been historically instituted and reconfigured, both within disciplinary confines and beyond. It seeks to elucidate ‘the world in fragments’, and, in demanding the continued problematization of existing horizons, the journal, as symbolized by the labyrinth, refuses ultimate closure. The International Journal of Social Imaginaries, as an interdisciplinary refereed journal, therefore invites contributions from philosophy, social theory, historical sociology, political philosophy, political theory as well as anthropology, cultural and social geography, hermeneutics, phenomenology, comparative philosophy, critical theory, legal and constitutional theory, and other fields or disciplines that advance our understanding of the human condition. Although the journal will publish English language manuscripts, we shall also occasionally translate significant essays from a variety of other languages, European and Asian. Essai sur les Mœurs et l’Esprit des Nations (Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations). London: J. Nourse (1759 edition). Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2011b. The Performative Revolution in Egypt. An Essay in Cultural Power. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Table of Contents

Marvin, Carolyn (1988-02-11). When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 9780198021384. Binder, Werner. 2016b. Magma und Scholle. Das soziale Imaginäre und die Wissenssoziologie. In Wissensforschung – Forschungswissen. Beiträge und Debatten zum 1. Sektionskongress der Wissenssoziologie, ed. Reiner Keller, Jürgen Raab, 533–543. Weinheim/Basel: BeltzJuventa. Lakoff, George. 2016. Moral Politics. How Liberals and Conservatives Think. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Poovey, M. "The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy." Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 125-45, p. 132 While not constituting an established reality, the social imaginary is nevertheless an institution in as much as it represents the system of meanings that govern a given social structure. These imaginaries are to be understood as historical constructs defined by the interactions of subjects in society. In that sense, the imaginary is not necessarily "real" as it is an imagined concept contingent on the imagination of a particular social subject. Nevertheless, there remains some debate among those who use the term (or its associated terms, such as imaginaire) as to the ontological status of the imaginary. Some, such as Henry Corbin, understand the imaginary to be quite real indeed, while others ascribe to it only a social or imagined reality.