During the Great Depression, California became a wellspring for some of the era's most inventive and imaginative political movements. In response to the global catastrophe, the multiracial laboring populations who formed the basis of California's economy gave rise to an oppositional culture that challenged the modes of racialism, nationalism, and rationalism that had guided modernization during preceding decades. In Rebel Imaginaries Elizabeth E. Sine tells the story of that oppositional culture's emergence, revealing how aggrieved Californians asserted political visions that embraced difference, fostered a sense of shared vulnerability, and underscored the interconnectedness and interdependence of global struggles for human dignity. From the Imperial Valley's agricultural fields to Hollywood, seemingly disparate communities of African American, Native American, Mexican, Filipinx, Asian, and White working-class people were linked by their myriad struggles against Depression-era capitalism and patterns of inequality and marginalization. In tracing the diverse coalition of those involved in labor strikes, citizenship and immigration reform, and articulating and imagining freedom through artistic practice, Sine demonstrates that the era's social movements were far more heterogeneous, multivalent, and contested than previously understood.

A story of self, braided to a story of American culture. Uniting personal history with cultural history, Dark Affinities, Dark Imaginaries tells a story of a mind, a time, and a culture. The vehicle or medium of this excursion is an overview and sampling of the author’s work, and what is revealed are cautionary tales of a once-aspiring egalitarian democracy confronted with plutocracy’s gentrification; of analog history and off-line life superseded by a rush toward virtualized, robotic, AI transformation of the human life-world; of everything social and public giving way to everything personal and opinionated. The vagaries of a lifetime of paths taken are woven together by a narrative that reveals in every piece a significance that was only partially present at its initial writing. Thus, the reader becomes involved in a developing story of a certain personal psyche working toward understanding its own development within a changing American culture. Sometimes angry, sometimes joyful, but always curious and wry, Joseph Natoli crosses the boundary lines of psychology, politics, literature, philosophy, education, and economics to show how we bring ourselves and our cultural imaginaries simultaneously into being through the processes and pleasures of thinking beyond the confines of the personal. “Reading Dark Affinities is a welcome break from the neoliberal buzzword-speak of politicians and university administrators. It reminds me why I entered academia, when it was a profession and not a business, and when modeling thinking actually mattered.” — Alison Lee, University of Western Ontario “Natoli’s Dark Affinities reads as a culminating work of scholarship, marshaling evidence from autobiography, literary analysis, critical theory, and everyday culture in support of its claims. Natoli presents his personal history in the same spirit that Raymond Williams did: as evidence for the ways that cultural forces shape individuals, and as grounds for the shaping of his intellectual and political practice.” — Jeff Karnicky, author of Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture

Postgrowth Imaginaries brings together environmental cultural studies and postgrowth economics to examine radical cultural shifts sparked by the global financial crisis. The globalization of an economic culture addicted to constant growth destroys the ecological planetary systems while failing to fulfil its social promises. A transition toward what Prádanos calls ‘postgrowth imaginaries’—the counterhegemonic cultural sensibilities that are challenging the growth paradigm—is well underway in the Iberian Peninsula today.

This Palgrave Pivot argues that if we are to understand civil conflict we need to grasp how everyday life is shaped by local conflict imaginaries. In order to examine this claim the book sets out to explore the contours of conflict imaginaries from two very different sites of conflict. Both Colombia and Indonesia have suffered from the collective trauma of political violence but in very different social, cultural and political contexts. Sketching out what they mean by a conflict imaginary, and explaining the relationship of this key concept to social imaginaries more broadly, the authors provide a historical overview of how political violence has been represented in both countries. They go on to outline the original qualitative research methods used to provide empirical evidence for the importance of conflict imaginaries, methods which allow them to explore the images and metaphors that underpin the spatial, chronological and emotional cartographies through which people make sense of political violence. With an emphasis on the construction of place-based knowledge, they consider the role of the local, the national and the global in the imagining of civil conflict, and show how film can be used to explore the imaginative worlds of social actors living alongside violence, revealing in the process the need to take seriously their hopes, fears, dreams and fantasies.

DIVAn accounting of the varying forms of social imaginary that have underpinned the rise of Western modernity./div

In 1945, Winston Churchill, fresh from winning World War Two for Britain, called an election. Within days, he was thrown out, and a completely new form of government took hold. What followed was a revolutionary period in British history, in which centuries of tradition were questioned. Socialism appeared to be waiting in the wings. This book traces the origins of this transformation in the long history of British democracy. It examines the ideas and actions which began in the 1930s that enabled this revolution and the new society that emerged beyond its origins and into the 21st Century. The problems that this revolution sought to solve remain to this day, as the British government in 2024 wrestles with strikes, social disorder, and massive economic headwinds. Understanding the history of the present dilemmas is essential if we are to grapple successfully with the enduring problems Britain still faces to this day.

The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries delves into examples of urban imaginaries across multiple media and geographies: from new visions of smart, eco, and resilient cities to urban dystopias in popular culture; from architectural renderings of starchitecture and luxury living to performative activism for new spatial justice; and from speculative experiments in urban planning, fiction, and photography to augmented urban realities in crowd-mapping and mobile apps. The volume brings various global perspectives together and into close dialogue to offer a broad, interdisciplinary, and critical overview of the current state of research on urban imaginaries. Questioning the politics of urban imagination, the companion gives particular attention to the role that urban imaginaries play in shaping the future of urban societies, communities, and built environments. Throughout the companion, issues of power, resistance, and uneven geographical development remain central. Adopting a transnational perspective, the volume challenges research on urban imaginaries from the perspective of globalization and postcolonial studies, inviting critical reconsiderations of urbanism in its diverse current forms and definitions. In the process, the companion explores issues of Western-centrism in urban research and design, and accommodates current attempts to radically rethink urban form and experience. This is an essential resource for scholars and graduate researchers in the fields of urban planning and architecture; art, media, and cultural studies; film, visual, and literary studies; sociology and political science; geography; and anthropology.

A defense of the radical imagination from a scholar of social movements. Political theorist and philosopher Richard Gilman-Opalsky’s Imaginary Power, Real Horizons is a tribute to the imagination and to its necessity for liberatory struggle. “‘Impractical’ is the name given to anyone who imagines something radically other than what exists,” he writes. However, many things—such as the abolition of slavery—were dismissed as impractical before they came to be. In a warm, plainspoken manner, these essays chart the affects of creativity and utopianism through topics as varied as the cyclical nature of popular movements; the international history of May Day; the experience of teaching political theory and Marxism in contemporary China; and the revolutionary aspirations of Free Jazz. The human imagination is a real, world-creating power, and those who would declare otherwise have a poor understanding of history. Imaginary Power, Real Horizons is a call to action for those who would dare to dream of a society organized by a different logic than capitalism.

The concept of world and the practice of world creation have been with us since antiquity, but they are now achieving unequalled prominence. In this timely anthology of subcreation studies, an international roster of contributors come together to examine the rise and structure of worlds, the practice of world-building, and the audience's reception of imaginary worlds. Including essays written by world-builders A.K. Dewdney and Alex McDowell and offering critical analyses of popular worlds such as those of Oz, The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Minecraft, Revisiting Imaginary Worlds provides readers with a broad and interdisciplinary overview of the issues and concepts involved in imaginary worlds across media platforms.