Intensive Summer Course 2027
Imagination Dead, Imagine: On imaginaries of the good life, being with the dead and all under heaven.
Instructor: Prof. Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
Email: mick.wilson@akademinvaland.gu.seTerm: Summer 2027
Course Format: Three-week intensive
Intensive Summer Course 2027
Imagination Dead, Imagine: On imaginaries of the good life, being with the dead and all under heaven.
The terms imagination and imaginary have acquired a renewed currency within contemporary criticism, theory and creative practice. Scholars of nationalism, global history and all manner of social organisations have long spoken of “imagined communities” and “the imaginary institution of society”, while literary scholars and theorists have sought to describe the ontological and epistemological status of the fictive and speculative worlds at work in imaginative narratives. Some have sought to think through the contrast of imagination as an individual faculty of invention with the imaginary as a shared pre-condition of collectivity. While others have sought to excavate the role of imagination in cognition and the possibility and potential limits of artificial imagination in the era of generative AI. While beyond the academy and its critical scholarly discourses, there is an intensified appeal to the powers of imagination in diverse domains, from marketing to social movements, from technological innovation to educational reform. The advertisements of banks, telecoms, lotteries and all manner of goods regularly instruct us to “just imagine…” This imperative phrase now encapsulates the lure and promise of the commodity. While champions of personal and social development declare that if we cannot imagine a better self or better world then we cannot hope to achieve it. This convergence of academic and non-academic discourses on the agency of the imagination is surely one of the key themes in our global contemporary.
This intensive course is structured as an enquiry into the competing accounts of imagination and the imaginary in contemporary cultural practice and scholarship. It draws upon a wide range of sources from philosophy, social and cultural theory to contemporary art, cinema and literature. The course invites participants to consider:
- How have imagination and the imaginary been conceptualised and mobilized within scholarship and creative practice?
- What are the onto-epistemic stakes of imagination and the imaginary?
- How have imagination and the imaginary emerged as central themes within the global contemporary?
- How has this ascendancy of imagination and the imaginary been contested?
- Is imagination invoked as an exclusively humanist theme or can it be reconstructed in alignment with post humanist, post-representational and postcolonial frameworks?
The course is structured around three focus areas of study distributed over three weeks: Week one considers imaginaries of the good life from ethical ideals to utopian themes encountered in art, literature and philosophy. Week two considers the variety of imagined communities of the living and the dead moving from their radical separation within colonial-modernity to their radical co-belonging within indigenous cosmologies. Week three considers the ways in which the wider world has been constructed in imaginaries ranging from “all under heaven” to “the global”, from the Planetary and the ever-expanding sense that “beyond the sky there is another sky” considering the proposition that while we may circumnavigate the world it remains beyond our reach to circumscribe the world. The course sets out under Beckett’s paradoxical injunction to imagine beyond the finitude of imagination.