Download or read book Collective Dreams written by Keally D. McBride and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2007-08-09 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society. Different chapters investigate how ideals of community intersect with conceptions of self and identity, family, the public sphere and civil society, and the state, situating community at the core of the most contested political and social arenas of our time. Ideals of community also influence how we evaluate, choose, and build the spaces in which we live, as the author’s investigations of Celebration, Florida, and of West Philadelphia show.Following in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Keally McBride reveals how consumer culture affects our collective experience of community as well as our ability to imagine alternative political and social orders. Taking ideals of community as a case study, Collective Dreams also explores the structure and function of political imagination to answer the following questions: What do these oppositional ideals reveal about our current political and social experiences? How is the way we imagine alternative communities nonetheless influenced by capitalism, liberalism, and individualism? How can these ideals of community be used more effectively to create social change?

Download or read book Literature and the Political Imagination written by Andrea T. Baumeister and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume shows how modern political theory can be enriched through an engagement with works of literature. It uses the resources of literature to explore issues such as nationalism, liberal philosophy, utopiansim, narrative and the role of theory in political thought. A variety of approaches are adopted and the aim is to show some of the many and diverse ways in which literature may enrich political theorising, as well as considering some of the problems to which this may give rise. The theorists discussed include Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. There are literary references from Greek tradegy, Jonathan Swift, Brian Moore, Elizabeth Bowen and contemporary feminist utopian fiction. All the contributors have a long-standing interest in the relations between literature and moral and political thought. They are concerned not to be restricted by conventional academic boundaries and are not united by any party-line or uniformity of intellectual commitments. This volume will be of great interest to all students engaged in the study of politics and literature.

Download or read book Rule Breaking and Political Imagination written by Kenneth A. Shepsle and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Imagination may be thought of as a ‘work-around.’ It is a resourceful tactic to ‘undo’ a rule by creating a path around it without necessarily defying it. . . . Transgression, on the other hand, is rule breaking. There is no pretense of reinterpretation; it is defiance pure and simple. Whether imagination or disobedience is the source, constraints need not constrain, ties need not bind.” So writes Kenneth A. Shepsle in his introduction to Rule Breaking and Political Imagination. Institutions are thought to channel the choices of individual actors. But what about when they do not? Throughout history, leaders and politicians have used imagination and transgression to break with constraints upon their agency. Shepsle ranges from ancient Rome to the United States Senate, and from Lyndon B. Johnson to the British House of Commons. He also explores rule breaking in less formal contexts, such as vigilantism in the Old West and the CIA’s actions in the wake of 9/11. Entertaining and thought-provoking, Rule Breaking and Political Imagination will prompt a reassessment of the nature of institutions and remind us of the critical role of political mavericks.

Download or read book Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa written by John L. Comaroff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community. Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."

Download or read book Capturing the Political Imagination written by Diane Stone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think tanks are proliferating. Although they are outside of government, many of these policy research institutes are perceived to influence political thinking and public policy. This book develops ideas about policy networks, epistemic communities and policy learning in relation to think tanks.

Download or read book Religion and the Political Imagination written by Ira Katznelson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of secularisation became a virtually unchallenged truth of twentieth-century social science. First sketched out by Enlightenment philosophers, then transformed into an irreversible global process by nineteenth-century thinkers, the theory was given substance by the precipitate drop in religious practice across Western Europe in the 1960s. However, the re-emergence of acute conflicts at the interface between religion and politics has confounded such assumptions. It is clear that these ideas must be rethought. Yet, as this distinguished, international team of scholars reveal, not everything contained in the idea of secularisation was false. Analyses of developments since 1500 reveal a wide spectrum of historical processes: partial secularisation in some spheres has been accompanied by sacralisation in others. Utilising new approaches derived from history, philosophy, politics and anthropology, the essays collected in Religion and the Political Imagination offer new ways of thinking about the urgency of religious issues in the contemporary world.

Download or read book Politics and the Concept of the Political written by James Wiley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recent trend in contemporary western political theory is to criticize it for implicitly trying to "conquer," "displace" or "moralize" politics. James Wiley’s book takes the "next step," from criticizing contemporary political theory, to showing what a more "politics-centered" political theory would look like by exploring the meaning and value of politics in the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Paul Ricoeur, Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, Claude Lefort, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. These political theorists all use the concept of "the political" to explain the value of politics and defend it from its detractors. They represent state-centered, republic-centered and society-centered conceptions of politics, as well as realist, authoritarian, idealist, republican, populist and radical democratic traditions of political thought. This book compares these theorists and traditions of "the political" in order to defend politics from its critics and to contribute to the development of a politics-centered political theory. Politics and the Concept of the Political will be a useful resource to general audiences as well as to specialists in political theory.

Download or read book A New Political Imagination written by Tony Fry and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents the case for the making of a new political imagination by offering a critique of existing political institutions, philosophy and practices that are unable to provide the thinking, means and leadership to deal with the complexity and crises of specific locales and the world at large. The authors make clear that there is a fundamental disjuncture between the complexity of the combined critical conditions that are now putting life on Earth at risk, and the divisions and theories of knowledge that are dominantly and instrumentally trying to understand the situation. In response, this work makes the case for the need for a new political imagination that rejects the sufficiency of existing political ideologies (including democracy) being the end point of politics. The book tackles the political underpinnings of social and economic life in a world still embedded in the inequities of the afterlife of colonialism and state socialism. Thereafter it engages narratives of change, rethinks imagination and critical practices, to finally present a relationally connected way to move forward. This trans-disciplinary volume is directed at those working in political philosophy and epistemology, critical global and security studies, decoloniality and postcolonial studies, design, critical anthropology and the post humanities. It is accessible to both academic audiences and activists and practitioners.

Download or read book Beckett s Political Imagination written by Emilie Morin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beckett's Political Imagination uncovers Beckett's lifelong engagement with political thought and political history, showing how this concern informed his work as fiction author, dramatist, critic and translator. This radically new account will appeal to students, researchers and Beckett lovers alike.

Download or read book Politics and the Imagination written by Raymond Geuss and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-07 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In politics, utopians do not have a monopoly on imagination. Even the most conservative defenses of the status quo, Raymond Geuss argues, require imaginative acts of some kind. In this collection of recent essays, including his most overtly political writing yet, Geuss explores the role of imagination in politics, particularly how imaginative constructs interact with political reality. He uses decisions about the war in Iraq to explore the peculiar ways in which politicians can be deluded and citizens can misunderstand their leaders. He also examines critically what he sees as one of the most serious delusions of western political thinking--the idea that a human society is always best conceived as a closed system obeying fixed rules. And, in essays on Don Quixote, museums, Celan's poetry, Heidegger's brother Fritz, Richard Rorty, and bourgeois philosophy, Geuss reflects on how cultural artifacts can lead us to embrace or reject conventional assumptions about the world. While paying particular attention to the relative political roles played by rule-following, utilitarian calculations of interest, and aspirations to lead a collective life of a certain kind, Geuss discusses a wide range of related issues, including the distance critics need from their political systems, the extent to which history can enlighten politics, and the possibility of utopian thinking in a world in which action retains its urgency.

Download or read book The Politics of Imagination written by Chiara Bottici and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-06-06 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Politics of Imagination offers a multidisciplinary perspective on the contemporary relationship between politics and the imagination. What role does our capacity to form images play in politics? And can we define politics as a struggle for people’s imagination? As a result of the increasingly central place of the media in our lives, the political role of imagination has undergone a massive quantitative and a qualitative change. As such, there has been a revival of interest in the concept of imagination, as the intimate connections between our capacity to form images and politics becomes more and more evident. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and theoretical outlooks, The Politics of Imagination examines how the power of imagination reverberates in the various ambits of social and political life: in law, history, art, gender, economy, religion and the natural sciences. And it will be of considerable interest to those with contemporary interests in philosophy, political philosophy, political science, legal theory, gender studies, sociology, nationalism, identity studies, cultural studies, and media studies.

Download or read book A Cookbook for Political Imagination written by Yael Bartana and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The publication A Cookbook for Political Imagination accompanies the exhibition. This is a manual of political instructions and recipes, delivered by more than 50 international authors. Covering a broad spectrum of themes, the cookbook comprises manifestos, artistic contributions, fictional stories to elements of visual identity, food recipes, social advice and guidance for members of the movement. It is the first book published under the auspices of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland, and has been edited by the curators of the exhibition, Sebastian Cichocki and Galit Eilat, and designed by Guy Saggee from Shual Studio (Tel Aviv). Published by Zachęta National Gallery of Art and Sternberg Press."--E-flux (http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/9664).

Download or read book Population and the Political Imagination written by R.B. Bhagat and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book identifies population as a central issue of polity and examines its links to ideas of state and citizenship. It explores the relationship between the state, citizenship and polity by reexamining processes related to census enumeration, population and citizen registers, and the politics of classificatory governmentality. Religion, ethnicity, caste and political class play a key role in determining community identities and the relationship between an individual and the state. Contextualizing the arguments and controversies around the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (CAA 2019) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the book examines the processes of inclusion or exclusion of minorities and migrants as citizens in India. It focusses on the classification of irregular and refugee migration since independence in India, especially in the state of Assam. The book highlights how political imagination, as a theoretical framework, shapes the processes and strategies for enumeration and classification and thereby the idea of citizenship. Underlining the relationship between instruments of government, political mobilization and the resurgence of communal polarization, it also offers suggestions for alternative constructions of citizenship and an inclusive state. This book will be useful for students and researchers of population studies, population geography, migration studies, sociology, political science, social anthropology, law and journalism. It will also be of interest to policy makers, journalists, as well as NGOs and CSOs.

Download or read book Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination written by Anthony Pagden and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, Spain was regarded as a unique social and political community--the most exalted, the most feared, the most despised, and the most discussed since the Roman Empire. In this important book, Anthony Pagden offers an incisive analysis of the lasting influence of the Spanish Empire in the history of early modern Europe and of its place in the European and SpanishAmerican political imagination.

Download or read book Political Violence and the Imagination written by Mathias Thaler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-09-10 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using a variety of theoretical reflections and empirically grounded case studies, this book examines how certain kinds of imagination – political, artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to various forms of political violence. Understanding political violence is a complex task, which involves a variety of operations, from examining the social macro-structures within which actors engage in violence, to investigating the motives and drives of individual perpetrators. This book focuses on the faculty of imagination and its role in facilitating our normative and critical engagement with political violence. It interrogates how the imagination can help us deal with past as well as ongoing instances of political violence. Several questions, which have thus far received too little attention from political theorists, motivate this project: Can certain forms of imagination – artistic, historical, philosophical – help us tackle the challenge of comprehending and responding to unprecedented forms of violence? What is the ethical and political value of artworks depicting human rights violations in the aftermath of conflicts? What about the use of thought experiments in justifying policy measures with regard to violence? What forms of political imagination can foster solidarity and catalyse political action? This book opens up a forum for an inclusive and reflexive debate on the role that the imagination can play in unpacking complex issues of political violence. The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.

Download or read book Imaginal Politics written by Chiara Bottici and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a new, systematic understanding of the imaginal and its nexus with the political, Chiara Bottici brings fresh perspective to the formation of political and power relationships and the paradox of a world rich in imagery yet seemingly devoid of imagination. Bottici begins by defining the difference between the imaginal and the imaginary, locating the imaginal's root meaning in the image and its ability to both characterize a public and establish a set of activities within that public. She identifies the imaginal's critical role in powering representative democracies and its amplification through globalization. She then addresses the troublesome increase in images now mediating politics and the transformation of politics into empty spectacle. The spectacularization of politics has led to its virtualization, Bottici observes, transforming images into processes with an uncertain relationship to reality, and, while new media has democratized the image in a global society of the spectacle, the cloned image no longer mediates politics but does the act for us. Bottici concludes with politics' current search for legitimacy through an invented ideal of tradition, a turn to religion, and the incorporation of human rights language.

Download or read book Kingdom Politics written by Kristopher Norris and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-04-16 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American Christians, weary of decades of entrenched partisan feuding, are increasingly distancing themselves from politics. Some, however, continue to turn toward the state and public policy to find solutions to the world's problems. The problem is that both responses allow a narrow vision of politics to determine the church's mission and ministries, which often ends up separating its commitment to personal faith from the pursuit of social justice--the King from the kingdom. Christians too easily forget that the church is inherently political, a community defined by its allegiance to a King, its citizenship in a new world, and its call to work alongside others in pursuit of a new way of life. The church needs a political vision that is more than blind acceptance or mere rejection of past models. It needs a positive vision that takes its cues about politics not from the nation-state but from another political reality: the kingdom of God. This book tells the stories of the visits of two researchers to five diverse congregations across the United States. From the megachurch energy of Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in California, to a young Emergent community in Minneapolis, to the politically active home of Martin Luther King in Atlanta, these stories illuminate the vastly different ways congregations understand and approach politics--and offer a glimpse of a new political imagination for today's church.