Handbook of Imagination and Culture

Imagination allows individuals and groups to think beyond the here-and-now, to envisage alternatives, to create parallel worlds, and to mentally travel through time. Imagination is both extremely personal (for example, people imagine unique futures for themselves) and deeply social, as our imagination is fed with media and other shared representations.

As a result, imagination occupies a central position within the life of mind and society. Expanding the boundaries of disciplinary approaches, the Handbook of Imagination and Culture expertly illustrates this core role of imagination in the development of children, adolescents, adults, and older persons today.

Bringing together leading scholars in sociocultural psychology and neighboring disciplines from around the world, this edited volume guides readers towards a much deeper understanding of the conditions of imagining, its resources, its constraints, and the consequences it has on different groups of people in different domains of society. Summarily, this Handbook places imagination at the center, and offers readers new ways to examine old questions regarding the possibility of change, development, and innovation in modern society.

Tania Zittoun is a sociocultural psychologist interested in the development of people across the course of life. She has studied informal learning and transitions, as well as the role of fiction, art, and religion in life. She works across the boundaries between cultural psychology, psychoanalysis and the social sciences, both theoretically and methodologically.

Vlad Glaveanu is a creativity researcher and sociocultural psychologist interested in the intersection between creativity and culture. He works in the cultural psychology areas of creativity, societal creativity, craft and materiality, social development, and social representations. His thinking about creativity is informed by pragmatism, dialogism, and distributed by cognition.

1. Imagination at the Frontiers of Cultural Psychology
Tania Zittoun and Vlad Glaveanu

SECTION I: CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CLARIFICATIONS
2. The Philosophy of Imagination
Dorthe Jørgensen

3. Roots of Creativity: Variability Amplification through Persistent Imitation
Jaan Valsiner

4. Creative Imagination
Vlad Petre Glaveanu, Maciej Karwowski, Dorota M. Jankowska, and Constance de Saint-Laurent

5. Imagination - Methodological Implications
Lene Tanggaard and Svend Brinkmann

SECTION II: IMAGINATION AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
6. Imagination in Children Entering Culture
Sandra Jovchelovitch, Jacqueline Priego-Hernandez, and Vlad Petre Glaveanu

7. Playing and Being - Imagination in the Life Course
Pernille Hviid and Jacob W. Villadsen

8. The Mnemonic Imagination and Second-Generation Migrant Experience
Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley

9. Imagination in Adults and the Aging Person: Possible Futures and Actual Past
Tania Zittoun and Tatsuya Sato

SECTION III: FRAMES FOR IMAGINATION
10. Imagination In and Beyond Education
Sanne Akkerman

11. Theatre and Imagination to (Re)Discover Reality
Tania Zittoun and Adeline Rosenstein

12. Music and Imagination
Sven Hroar Klempe

SECTION IV: IMAGINATION IN SOCIETY, FROM PAST TO FUTURE
13. Imagination in Community Engagement
Colette Daiute

14. Imagining the Self through Cultural Technologies
Alex Gillespie, Kevin Corti, Simon Evans and Brett Heasman

15. From Imagination to Well-Controlled Images: Challenge for the Dialogical Mind
Ivana Marková

CONCLUSION
16. The Future of Imagination in Sociocultural Research
Vlad Glaveanu and Tania Zittoun