The Imaginaire and (Re)Shaping the World

Call for Papers

According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “To imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently and subjectively are”. Imagination is associated with creativity and the ability to invent visions, ideas, images, societies and sensations in ways that transcend reason and reach beyond reality. It is a force that ongoingly wrestles with the constitution of reality and is credited for having shaped the world as we know it through the cumulative work of writers, artists and philosophers. 

Imagination, hence, produces, creates a higher reality that becomes the new reality. It is a synthesizing force that oscillates between the fantastic and the real, the conscious and the unconscious, words and images, or, in Bachelard’s words, the earth and the wind.

This symposium aims at investigating ideas and imagined systems that have shaped humanity and new imagined forms that are changing the world. It invites researchers to analyze paradigms that have contributed to shaping the world and explore the emerging paradigms that open up trajectories for re-shaping the future. It aims to cover, but is not limited to, the following themes:

· The new theoretic imaginaries

· Building communities in literature (e.g. Sci-Fi, Cli-Fi)

·       Imagination in language teaching and learning

·       Imagination as mediated through language and rhetoric (e.g. tropes)

·       Analyzing imaginative language

·       Non-linguistic mediation of the imagined (e.g. the visual, the virtual, the artistic)

· The imaginaire mediating our being-in-the-world

· The critical juncture of the “imagined” and “the real”

· Imagined spaces, communities and homelands in the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial Global South

·  Imagined (virtual) histories and the re-shaping of the world

· Imagination as a tool for the production of knowledge

· The imagined in translation studies (both literal and cultural translation)

· The imagined and the psychology of art production and reception

· The imagined in Archetypal Criticism

· Spirituality and the aesthetics of imagination

· Imagination and applied sciences