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This study builds on theories of user imaginaries by examining how LGBTQ+ creators in Montreal, Canada and Berlin, Germany respond to perceived algorithmic bias. Through observation and close reading of creators' Instagram content, the study finds that expectations of discrimination based on sexual and gender identity, embedded in geographical and sociocultural contexts, shape these users' understandings of threats posed by algorithmic governance. Findings also identified three main responses to perceived algorithmic bias: direct calls for engagement, strategies for eluding algorithmic surveillance, and adaptation to presumed algorithmic parameters. Instead of giving up or leaving, these responses demonstrated users' participatory resignation, as an expectation of algorithmic bias informed by past experiences of identity-based discrimination paired with determination to negotiate such bias to endure on the platform. Thus, this article contributes a novel comparative analysis that expands conceptualizations of algorithmic imaginaries while revealing how resignation is mobilized as resistance to algorithmic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on two case studies in Germany, this study disentangles development traps by focusing on the role of narratives and imaginaries in peripheral regions. Drawing on 43 interviews and two focus groups, it shows how regions move towards development traps despite putative new opportunities through green transitions. The study highlights different narrative dimensions and how they serve as indicators for regional development trajectories. It expands the understanding of development traps and peripheral regions by showing how stories and imaginaries held by key actors materialise and become regional realities and calls for more place sensitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how non-experts reflect on and come to understand 'data uses', a phrase we used to refer to data collection, analysis and sharing. In recent years, research into what people think and feel about data uses has proliferated, whereas this paper focuses on how they do their thinking and feeling. We argue that imagining – that is, building or creating a mental image of something that is not present – is an important aspect of reflecting on data uses. We challenge the proposition that imagining takes place when there is a gap in knowledge or a lack of information, arguing instead that imagining plays an agentic role in reflection, enabling critical questioning of data uses. We draw on qualitative research carried out in the UK, in which we provided information about specific public sector data uses and asked participants how they felt about them. We found that imaginings, or 'what ifs', exist in a complex entanglement with different knowledges, including experiential knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of imaginaries of preemptive hope in second‐tier cities and regions within the global petroleumscape that face an uncertain future in a post‐petroleum world order. It highlights the importance of such imaginaries in discussions of stability, destabilisation, and ruptures in the petroleum landscape. The article examines the assumptions and presuppositions that undergird the post‐petroleum imaginaries in Stavanger, Norway's oil capital and self‐proclaimed energy capital of Europe, and how these can be conceptualised as imaginaries of preemptive hope. These imaginaries are framed as a promise of a new oil waiting to be realised—thus promising a status quo post‐petroleum future that only requires technical adjustments. These new oil imaginaries become forms of repair and maintenance of the petroleumscape because they primarily promise to maintain the wealth, status, and privileges attained from their position in the petroleumscape—a promise that they are unable to realise. The broader implication of the study is that we need to pay more attention to the imaginable post‐petroleum futures governing second‐tier cities’ and regions’ economic strategies in maintaining the status quo, not just the actions of global oil majors and leading petro‐states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Videogames are an increasingly prominent use case for blockchain technology (what has been termed 'cryptogaming'). Drawing on documents, such as industry presentations, social media posts, interviews and white papers, this article analyses discourses surrounding cryptogames, focusing on the claims made by cryptogame developers and investors. We ask two related research questions: What are the dominant visions of a cryptogaming future, imagined by and for various constituencies? And what sorts of values get realised in such an imagined future of game development and use? We argue that cryptogames imagine players and developers as financialised subjects, adopting attitudes and practices of risk and investment as salves to both microeconomic problems in the games industry as well as broader macroeconomic issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of educational technologies in schools is being reshaped by a new kind of intermediary organization that brokers relations between schools, academia, governance, and industry. In this article we define and examine 'edtech brokers' as organizations that operate between the edtech industry, public schools, research centers and governments, guiding schools in the procurement and pedagogical use of edtech. Edtech brokers have remained mostly unexplored despite their potential to redraw the boundaries between public education and the global edtech market. We claim that edtech brokers have become increasingly relevant in the past years, embedding new types of professionalities into education, and taking an active role in co-creating and updating schools' digital infrastructures, the evidence-making mechanisms around edtech, and the pedagogical practices around edtech. The article proposes three distinct categories of edtech brokers – ambassador, search engine, and data brokers – and explores their practices of mediation. By doing so, we outline the potential effects that brokers can have on schools and edtech markets, and we disentangle their specific imaginaries of the future of education they promote, often aligned with wider policy desires for reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Immortality constitutes a very human desire and its pursuit arguably shapes prominent features of human societies. In the twenty-first century, capitalism develops technologies that promise immortality as indefinite survival. Scholars who study immortality often showcase the links between technology, social structures and immortality projects, but a critical inquiry is needed to examine how (techno-)capitalism creates immortality projects that expand the frontiers of capital in contemporary societies. In this article, I highlight how techno-capitalism configures three prominent immortality imaginaries: transhumanist digital immortality, radical biological life-extension, and cryonics. I identify three tendencies of techno-capitalism − 1) expanding commodification to new realms of life, 2) creating new forms of alienation and 3) subordinating life to the private accumulation of capital – and explain how they shape the immortality imaginaries. I argue that pursuing techno-capitalist immortality would induce significant harms for human beings, promising freedom from death but actually sustaining techno-capitalism's exploitative relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the meanings of the public space, specifically addressing urban marginalized areas. It explores the issue of inequality in relation to public space and how this is reflected in urban policies. Starting from a theoretical framework based on three heuristic dimensions regarding practices, imaginaries, and norms, the authors will analyze through a multidisciplinary approach—that brings planning and cultural anthropology into dialogue—three cases related to some resignification and re-appropriation dynamics within a neighborhood of social housing located in Milan. The three cases concern: a regeneration project of a road accomplished through an experimental municipal device; a recently renewed square located on the border of the neighborhood; the organization of a public event to clean up waste. The public space of San Siro will emerge as an arena where several social actors and their conflicting interests clash, thus affecting the everyday life of its residents and the possibilities for planning an inclusive city as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public sector data is increasingly seen as a key resource for value creation in the private sector across a wide range of countries. Situated within studies on technology policies, this paper investigates how the idea of data as a resource has become embedded in public policy through a case study on the Norwegian context. Which policy problem exist for which technological developments seem to provide the best solutions? As documents are an important site of governance, we trace the imaginary of value creation through public data by studying the main datafication policy documents in Norway. By making visible the self-referencing practiced in policy reports, we illustrate how datafication policies are based on fictional calculation-based anticipations. We show how the Norwegian government positions itself as a facilitator, rather than regulator of data markets. Our analysis captures the technological determinism driving public policy. In addition, we show how supranational actors and consultancy agencies play an important role in constructing the Nordic data imaginary. We argue that the act of producing policy papers is in itself an important action keeping the imaginary alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on two case studies in Germany, this study disentangles development traps by focusing on the role of narratives and imaginaries in peripheral regions. Drawing on 43 interviews and two focus groups, it shows how regions move towards development traps despite putative new opportunities through green transitions. The study highlights different narrative dimensions and how they serve as indicators for regional development trajectories. It expands the understanding of development traps and peripheral regions by showing how stories and imaginaries held by key actors materialise and become regional realities and calls for more place sensitivity.

The Arctic has been identified by scientists as a relatively promising venue for controversial ‘solar geoengineering’ – technical schemes to reflect more sunlight to counteract global warming. Yet contemporary regional security dynamics and the relative (in)significance of climate concerns among the key Arctic states suggest a different conclusion. By systematically juxtaposing recently published schemes for Arctic geoengineering with Arctic security strategies published by the littoral Arctic states and China, we reveal and detail two conflicting security imaginaries. Geoengineering schemes scientifically securitise (and seek to maintain) the Arctic’s ‘great white shield’ to protect ‘global’ humanity against climate tipping points and invoke a past era of Arctic ‘exceptionality’ to suggest greater political feasibility for research interventions here. Meanwhile, state security imaginaries understand the contemporary Arctic as an increasingly contested region of considerable geopolitical peril and economic opportunity as temperatures rise. Alongside the entangled history of science with geopolitics in the region, this suggests that geoengineering schemes in the Arctic are unlikely to follow scientific visions, and unless co-opted into competitive, extractivist state security imaginaries, may prove entirely infeasible. Moreover, if the Arctic is the ‘best-case’ for geoengineering politics, this places a huge question mark over the feasibility of other, more global prospects.

Nordic life vlogs are a popular genre among avid watchers of YouTube influencers across East Asia. The vlogs showcase “a slice of life” content, documenting the simple living, daily routines, beautiful landscapes, cultural festivals, and everyday norms of what it is like to live in the Nordic region. While there are many Nordic life vloggers, in this article, we focus on a subset: young immigrant women from Japan and South Korea living in the Nordics. By attending to the genre, content, and interactions between vloggers and viewers, we explore how female East Asian YouTube vloggers who have immigrated to Nordic countries construct fantasised and fantastical narratives around Nordic imaginaries. The discussion of multifaceted layers of Nordic imaginaries explains how Nordic life vlogs serve as a platform for young East Asian women to project their desire for a better life and cultivate subtle resilience at the juncture of postfeminism and postcolonialism.

What does it mean to represent a city? We examine this question through drawing from and seeking to read across two somewhat distinct meanings of representation, stemming from cultural theory and political studies. The reason for approaching representation in this way is an interest in how elected representatives claim the city. Based on interviews with members of the London Assembly, we take a transversal cut across party and geographical lines to analyse the nature and content of their representative claims, identifying two main types: the city as an identity and as a place or a collection of places. The politicians invoke cultural and institutional dimensions of representation and representativeness. The usefulness of employing both senses of representation is that through its representatives, the city—and urban democratic representation—is more than a discrete object or even a multiplicity of viewpoints, but rather a process continually made and remade through practices and claims, even as these slide across scales. These repertoires of representation, of the city as is and as it could be, signal how even from a place of seeming political marginality, the city is open to multiple imagined ideals that are shared and cut across conventional political lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metropa an "art and peace project" by artist and musician Stefan Frankenberger envisions a future European railroad network through the visual metaphor of an urban subway map offering both an infrastructural and a political proposal for the future of the European continent. This essay explores Frankenberger's vision from a historical perspective tracing the origins of the its visual language its relationship with past trans-European railway projects and its political implications. The article concludes that although metropa 's technical and political ambitions are deeply connected to the present its visual appeal and references to historical precedents enhance its affective and political impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section of Public History explores "infrastructural imaginaries"—shared visions of future infrastructure that are collectively held and either publicly enacted or resisted. These imaginaries are deeply rooted in both present realities and past dreams of what could have been. For historians of technology understanding who imagines this infrastructure the impacts of these imaginings and the emotional forces driving these processes is essential. The contributions in this section explore artistic interventions that blend utopian ideas visual languages political ambitions and radical actions. These interventions challenge us to rethink the contours of our infrastructure-dominated world and invite further historical analysis in these public discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this editorial we highlight the need for empirical studies into the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in healthcare and social work settings, especially studies which are theoretically informed by critical social science studies of risk and uncertainty. In setting out the importance of interpretative and critical traditions for research into such AI-oriented forms of risk work, we propose three important conceptual lines of inquiry which empirical studies might follow. First, we sketch ways in which the enactment of AI in healthcare work may be changing how risk is handled amid professional decision-making, and creating new categories of patient/service-user. Patients may be evaluated as being at lower or higher risk depending, respectively, upon their engagement or non-engagement with AI-technologies. These questions of (non-)engagement lead us to consider, second, the trust and distrust dynamics around AI-technologies, exploring the potential inequalities that can emerge as a result of (non) engagement. We then consider drivers of this technological embrace in terms of hope and magical thinking in technological-imaginaries, connecting these cultural tendencies to broader structures of ideology and political-economic interests. We conclude this editorial with a plea to social scientists to be cautious to avoid both techno-optimistic narratives and alarmist warnings regarding the implications of artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, we argue that our focus should be a theoretically informed and detailed examining of how expectations (pertaining to risk, trust, and hope) materialise in practice, particularly in the daily experiences of those who develop and enact AI technologies in care settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this editorial to the Topical Collection “Innovation under Fire: The Rise of Ethics in Tech”, we provide an overview of the papers gathered in the collection, reflect on similarities and differences in their analytical angles and methodological approaches, and carve out some of the cross-cutting themes that emerge from research on the production of ‘Tech Ethics’. We identify two recurring ways through which ‘Tech Ethics’ are studied and forms of critique towards them developed, which we argue diverge primarily in their a priori commitments towards what ethical tech is and how it should best be pursued. Beyond these differences, we observe how current research on ‘Tech Ethics’ evidences a close relationship between public controversies about technological innovation and the rise of ethics discourses and instruments for their settlement, producing legitimacy crises for ‘Tech Ethics’ in and of itself. ‘Tech Ethics’ is not only instrumental for governing technoscientific projects in the present but is equally instrumental for the construction of socio-technical imaginaries and the essentialization of technological futures. We suggest that efforts to reach beyond single case-studies are needed and call for collective reflection on joint issues and challenges to advance the critical project of ‘Tech Ethics’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When it comes to relationships with technology, questions of trust and trustworthiness are never far away. This paper explores how the rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies into people’s everyday lives pushes the question of what it means to trust technology into new and unfamiliar territories, far beyond traditional frameworks associated with either functional reliability (subject-object), or those that take their inspiration from interpersonal (subject-subject) relations. Challenging the cognitivist and humanist emphases of such models of trust, the paper instead develops a more ontological sense of trust which foregrounds the complex material processes and unconscious forces that shape how people think and relate to AI. Drawing on in-depth interviews with users of AI-enabled navigation apps (like Google Maps and Waze), we draw out these ontological dimensions of trust in three main ways. First, how relationships with these technologies are strongly shaped by imaginaries that have significant performative impacts on how AI is conceived and whether and how it can be trusted. Second, how people’s sense of trust is often attuned to the broader socio-technical ecologies that shape AI’s existence. And finally, how the affective force of everyday habits enables or constrains trust in relation to specific contexts and scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Digital platforms are involved in a reconfiguration of imaginaries surrounding the prediction of homosexuality. Analysis: This article analyzes three technoscientific controversies. The first addresses the prediction of users' sexual orientation based on the content they like on Facebook. The second deals with facial recognition software aimed at predicting homosexuality. Finally, the third focuses on the alleged ability of TikTok's algorithms to influence the sexual orientation of its users. Conclusion and implications: Analyzing the diverse imaginaries around prediction allows us to understand the concerns that various social actors share about artificial intelligence and its implications for LGBTQ+ communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological debates on the mobilising force of imagined futures are particularly relevant in our present context of climate emergency, where the claim-making of a 'threatened future' has come to the fore in civic mobilisations worldwide. This article addresses these debates by empirically examining how adverse views of the future underpinning present thematisations of climate change as an emergency shape collective action. Based upon qualitative research conducted in Barcelona on new climate movements, I analyse the content and form of two imagined futures ('catastrophe' and 'collapse') that emerge from the ways in which participants of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future engage with the future and climate. This analysis shows how these imagined futures are reflected in individual imaginations and processed by these movements, infusing different forms of agency and impacting trajectories of action in the present. This empirically grounded focus on imagined climate futures reveals that not only are cognitions of climate risks crucial, but so are the emotions that these produce in configuring collective action. Likewise, this study highlights how even disastrous imagined climate futures include utopian impulses for sustainable futures as both a driver and result of collective action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the 1981 People's March for Jobs as a moment of unemployed activism and solidarity in the UK. The paper argues that the march revealed a spatial politics of solidarity as characterised through mobility, presence, imaginaries and dialogue. It considers how the march emerged through trade union organising and forged political alliances in articulating opposition against rising unemployment, challenging the associated stigma around labour market inactivity. Contributing to geographical scholarship on 'working‐class presence' and concepts of 'imagined solidarity', the paper explores the 'solidarity infrastructures' that enabled unemployed resistance. It considers material resources alongside a more generative and imaginary understanding of solidarity as fostered through the march. These more transitory and temporary forms of solidarity are meaningful in their immediacy, but also hold longer lasting impacts on both those involved and the places visited. In this regard, the combination of 'imagined solidarities' and 'solidarity infrastructures' provides geographers with an insight into the spatial dynamics of marching as resistance, as well as reflecting a wider resonance with trade union sensibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sosiologia is the property of Westermarck Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper combines assemblage theory, feminist ethics of care and decolonial theory to build on recent work in disaster studies that seeks to address the systematic and intersectional inequalities that underlie the emergence of disaster. We argue that Western logics of "risk" do not always have traction with communities, and so researchers must "stay with the trouble" in engaging with tensions between lifeworlds. We suggest that geographical imaginaries provide a means to analyze the diverse ways of being and knowing that are involved in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we are to achieve climate change targets, transport systems need to transform. This article is concerned with the prospects of challenging the regime of automobility in urban areas. It employs a governmentality framework, alongside theories of automobility, in order to analyse mobility governmentalities in Gothenburg, Sweden. Gothenburg is an interesting case in the context of reducing car use given its identity as a 'car city.' Despite this, Gothenburg has high ambitions in terms of reducing car traffic. Reaching these goals are however associated with challenges: prognoses predict a continued increase in car traffic, and political acceptance is viewed as an obstacle. The article's findings are based on semi-structured interviews with public officials and stakeholders, zooming in on (1) conflicting spatialities and temporalities (2) competing logics of circulation and pace and (3) mobility imaginaries of the (im)possible. We argue that while there are new logics entering urban mobility governmentalities as an effect of the climate transition, their possibilities to affect material change are confined because the movement and circulation of 'people and things,' ultimately represented by the private car, are closely tied to the way that freedom is exercised, understood and manifested in contemporary liberal societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Africa Spectrum is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many scholars have turned to neighboring, or neighbor interactions and practices, as an open-ended process rather than a finished ideal. In doing so, they have disrupted the romanticization of the neighborhood as a community-driven and stable space. Through this lens, the proximity of dwelling is seen just as a possibility for social contact rather than a crucial characteristic of neighbor relations. Amid the rapid transformations in contemporary urban environments, neighbor relations as spatial practices are shaped and mediated by multiple forces. Based on five research cases from Brazil, Denmark, Finland, and Russia, this Special Issue, "Materialities and Senses of Neighboring," explores how neighbor relations are shaped by material and sensory practices in the context of urban housing and localities. This editorial introduction to this Special Issue of Space and Culture highlights the main points of how the foregrounding of material and sensory aspects contributes to the studies of neighbor relations. It then shows how the cross-cutting themes of shared materiality, housing geometry, sensoriality, and imaginaries interplay in the contributors' articles to develop the overarching idea of the collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the visions of citizens' ideal practices regarding technoscientific affairs in a democratic society, namely "imaginaries of model citizens," that underlie three science and public initiatives: public understanding of science, public engagement in science, and citizen science. While imaginaries of citizens are performative and necessary to these initiatives, they are often relegated to the background. I argue that such imaginaries are the result of a complex of perceptions on the nature of science, the role of democracy in scientific activities, and the form of "democratizing" science. The imaginary of model citizens in public understanding of science is of literate citizens who should know science sufficiently, use it in daily life, and support science; in public engagement in science, the model citizen is a responsible one who should engage in the governance of technoscientific issues; and in citizen science, a contributive one who should partake in and enjoy creating scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Imperialism and colonial practices have been addressed by the scholars throughout the years due to the transcendence of the imperial experience as a phenomenon that articulates and shapes the modern structure of the international system. In this article we argue that imperial imaginaries not only forged our past, but still seem to manifest productive effects, influencing our capacities to think about the future. In that regard, we identify Science Fiction as a political battleground where imaginaries are produced, reinforced and challenged. Engaging critically with the literature, and cultural artefacts from the genre, we propose the notion of Future Imperial Imaginaries. We utilise this conceptual advancement to talk about coming worlds that would force us to relive colonial practices of the past, and thus foreclose future alternative political imaginaries. Next, we analyse the series The Expanse, under this conceptual framework and identify the presence of the different dimensions of the Future Imperial Imaginaries in it. In the last section we present our final thoughts and reflections.

ABSTRACTThe growing scale and intensity of climate change poses a substantial challenge to the status quo of society and politics. Adapting to the risks associated with extreme weather events and changing climatic conditions will require the re-imagination of many aspects of politics and society. Therefore, climate change can be framed as a problem of imagination; one in which our relationship to the future is central to understanding how possibilities in the present are perceived. This research analyses public submissions made on New Zealand’s first draft National Adaptation Plan to understand how future climate adaptation is framed and imagined by different groups. In analysing submissions we identify and describe four thematic ‘adaptive futures’ that each argue for varied amounts of socio-political change from the status quo: data driven resilience; growth and opportunity; nature-society change; and flaxroots transformation. Underpinning these adaptive futures are emerging advocacy coalitions that seek to shape what is seen as possible, imaginatively, politically and materially. Our analysis also highlights how risks and opportunities are perceived by whom, and insights into attempts to delineate the boundaries of adaptive imagination and political possibility.Glossary of Māori terms: hapū: kinship group; iwi: extended kinship or tribal group; kaitiakitanga: intergenerational sustainability; kaupapa Māori: Māori approach, a philosophical doctrine, incorporating the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values of Māori society; kawa: protocols; mana: authority, dignity, control, governance & power; mana whenua: territorial rights, power from the land, authority over land or territory, jurisdiction over land or territory; te ao Māori: the Māori worldview; tikanga: correct procedures, lore & practises Definitions sourced from Blackett et al. 2022 & Te Aka Māori Dictionary

This article develops the concept of gastroimaginaries – narratives that use food as a rhetorical device to define and encapsulate what are believed to be the essential characteristics of a people, place, and time. The article adapts the concept of social imaginaries – defined by Taylor (2023) as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others … ” – to underscore the significance of food-related narratives for shaping, reinforcing, and potentially contesting regional identity and place-making projects, and for signaling membership within a particular group or imagined community. I apply the gastroimaginary framework to an analysis of food media representations of the American South, arguing that dominant gastroimaginary frames – which emphasize potent but generally uncritical ideas like hospitality and nostalgia – generally elide the realities of food system labor and environmental and other externalities; alternative or subversive gastroimaginaries, however, can both attend to these past and present realities while imagining more radical futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book searches on the drafting (known as Repartimiento) of indigenous people between 1878 and 1886. It invites the reader to rethink the construction of our Nation's historicity through a bottom-up approach, based on a strong consideration of the people in bottom position. From the perspective of microhistory, and with the concept of genre as a central analytical category, Pablo Daniel Arias presents the reconstruction of four biographies that take the reader not only into the particular experiences of certain individuals but also into the imaginaries of a time and a Nation. Here, the protagonists are not the big heroes or villains now in our national pantheon, and their stories are not related to great historic deeds. On the contrary, the book deals with three women's and an indigenous boy's courses from the moment of their forced drafting in the context of the euphemistic Desert Campaign up to their placement in Buenos Aires family homes or their recruitment in the Argentine Army. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several jurisdictions have exerted controls over people's mobilities as a way of containing viral spread. In Australia, international borders were closed for almost two years and internal borders were periodically shut and policed as part of strong public health measures implemented by federal and state governments. In this article, we discuss how Australians conceptualized risk in relation to border controls, drawing on a set of interviews conducted in 2021 in which participants were asked to recount their experiences of the pandemic. Our analysis builds on social and cultural scholarship to understand the symbolic meanings and socio-spatialities of our participants' accounts of living in COVID times, in which they were confined within both national and internal borders. Our findings suggest three main socio-spatial imaginaries at work in participants' accounts of life behind closed borders during COVID-19. The first imaginary is an idea of immunity as a spatial property, supporting the concept of geographic immunity. The second is an ambivalent distinction between Self and Other produced through borders hastily thrown up along state lines. The third is the experience behind closed borders of living in a state of 'suspension', whereby risk is provisionally held off spatially, yet projected into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Landscapes are conceptually fuzzy and rich, and subject to plural framings. They are places of inquiry and intervention for scientists and practitioners, but also concepts bound to peoples' dynamic identities, knowledge systems, inspiration, and well-being. These varying interpretations change the way landscapes function and evolve. Developed in the 1930s, Q-methodology is increasingly recognized for being useful in documenting and interrogating environmental discourses. Yet its application in the context of how integrated landscape approaches better navigate land-use dilemmas is still in its infancy. Based on our experience and emerging literature, such as the papers in this special collection, this article discusses the value of Q-methodology in addressing landscape sustainability issues. Q-methodology helps unravel and communicate common and contradicting landscape imaginaries and narratives in translational and boundary-spanning ways, thus bridging actors' different understandings of problems and solutions and revealing common or differentiated entry points for negotiating trade-offs between competing land uses. The methodology can be empowering for marginalized people by uncovering their views and aspirational values to decision-makers and policymakers. We argue that this potential can be further strengthened by using Q to identify counter-hegemonic discourses and alliances that combat injustices regarding whose knowledge and visions count. In this way, applying Q-methodology in integrated landscape approaches can become a key tool for transitioning toward just, inclusive, and sustainable landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As corporate social responsibility research increasingly focuses on the role of grassroots organizations in challenging business practices, there remains a gap in understanding how these organizations prefigure alternatives to the prevailing business status quo. This study addresses this gap by developing a framework of prefigurative imaginaries, drawing from a qualitative study of a grassroots organization confronting the social irresponsibility of the Kenyan banking system in serving the poor. The framework captures how grassroots organizations use imaginaries to prefigure an alternative community currency system for enacting and foreshadowing social change. However, when attempts were made to scale up the system, these actions became disjointed, resulting in cracks within the imaginaries and the eventual abandonment of the system. Our study contributes to corporate social responsibility research by broadening its scope to include grassroots organizations and unveiling how they prefigure social change in marginalized contexts. By highlighting the significant influence of imaginaries on experiences and practices, this study underscores their role in shaping the acceptance or rejection of grassroots initiatives by the communities they aim to serve. It has implications for scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the role of imaginaries in shaping community-driven initiatives and advancing social change agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Density dominates current urban discussions, especially in light of still-developing understandings of Covid-19's impact on urban populations. This paper argues that critical scrutiny of visual representations of urban density is both missing from academic focus and critically important for understanding how perceptions of density are both created and reproduced. The political rhetoric of density shapes public perceptions as much as it responds to them, and scrutiny of visual density politics adds a new lens to critical density debates. This research takes the speculative imagery of imagined future density created for a public ballot referendum in Zurich, Switzerland as the main focus, and compares the verbal and written campaign rhetoric to the visual images produced as tools of public persuasion. By assessing the gap between what the campaigns claim and what the campaign imagery represents, the research finds embedded in conventional rhetoric a deep-seated and self-defeating assumption that the electorate unilaterally fears density and the changes it might bring. As a winning electoral strategy assuming fear of density worked; as a tool of persuasion it failed, and risks amplifying or creating the perception it assumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As communities around the world grapple with the impacts of climate change on the basic support systems of life, their future climate imaginaries both shape and are shaped by actions and material realities. This paper argues that the three globally dominant imaginaries of a climate changed future, which we call 'business as usual', 'techno-fix' and 'apocalypse' – fail to encourage actions that fundamentally challenge or transform the arrangements that underpin systemic injustices and extractive forms of life. And yet, to meet the challenges associated with food production, energy needs, and the destruction of ecosystems, people are coming together, not only to take transformative action, but in doing so, to create and nurture alternative imaginaries. This paper presents empirical findings about how communities in north and south India and south-east Australia are pre-figuring alternative futures, locally and in most cases in the absence of broader state support. An analysis of communities' actions and reflections indicates that their praxes are altering their future imaginaries, and we consider how these local shifts might contribute to broader changes in climate imaginaries. At the heart of the emerging imaginaries are a set of transformations in the relational fabric within which communities are embedded and how they attend to those relations: relations within community, with the more-than-human, and with time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Revista Virtual Universidad Católica del Norte is the property of Revista Virtual Universidad Catolica del Norte and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Questions of actual and imagined relationality are still a gap in small town research. The paper closes this gap by focusing on the imagined relations and relational imaginaries of two small towns, Zeitz and Lauchhammer, in eastern Germany. Such imaginaries are considered as discursive constructs and are effective in multiple dimensions (e.g. flows of people, capital and infrastructures) and on multiple scales (e.g. local, regional, national). As such, they decisively shape the identity and actual development paths of places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociedade e Estado is the property of Sociedade e Estado and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)