Imagination

Advancement in the arts and sciences is a primary driver of economic production and social policy in post-industrial societies. Imagination steps back and asks ‘what advances the arts and sciences?’ This book explores the collective, social and global dimension of human imagining—and the ambivalent relationship of social institutions, including universities, schools, economies, media and culture industries, to the collective imagination. Basic discovery requires high levels of creative thinking: Imagination looks at the social conditions that make path-breaking thought possible on a large scale. It examines the role of aesthetic, pictorial, digital, paradoxical and other imaginative styles of thinking, and the times and places in which such styles become socially prominent and a significant force in economic and cultural production. It looks at successful societies as they are approaching their peak, when new ideas are driving them forward.

The Authors: Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communications and Director of the Social Aesthetics Research Unit at Monash University, Australia. His books include Civic Justice and Dialectic of Romanticism. Michael A. Peters is Professor of Education in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and holds a position as Adjunct Professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (School of Art). Among his books are Showing and Doing, Global Knowledge Cultures, Subjectivity and Truth, Why Foucault? and Building Knowledge Cultures. Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he works in that University's Centre for the Study of Higher Education. His books include Markets in Education, The Enterprise University and Prospects of Higher Education.