Imagination and the Public Sphere

Download or read book Imagination and the Public Sphere written by Susan G. Cumings and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagination and the Public Sphere is an interdisciplinary collection which explores the politics of identities and the equally challenging politics of social space, seeking the potential for authentic debate and dissent in a public sphere transformed by the mass media and consumer culture. Using both contemporary and historical examples, contributors to this volume address such intersecting, and at times competing, elements of lived experience and cultural practice as art and politics, celebrity culture and staged display, gender and religion, religion and science, religion and technology, and technology and teaching, aware of the dynamic interplays of expression and regulation and alert for the emergence of unanticipated ways of living and making meaningful connection. This collection asks, in an era that sees identities increasingly pre-packaged and lives thoroughly mediatized and multiply surveyed, what it means to have collectivity, collective life, and what it means to imagine new possibilities and perform them into being. It asks that we take part in addressing these questions together.