Online event, 9:30am EST, April 7, 2021 – Hosted by the Third Age Learning program of Lakehead University.
Part of the “Pivot(al): Possibilities for a Post-pandemic World” lecture series of the Third Age Learning program of Lakehead University. – More information and tickets are available here –> https://www.lakeheadu.ca/about/orillia-campus/community-programs/tal/tall-tbay
What if we imagined the imagination as the basic building block of our society and everything in it? Take today’s increasingly digital form of money for example: an imaginary substance given value by our shared imaginative energies, but with a profound power over life and death around the world. Money is only one of many social and political institutions that depends on the imagination. Indeed, most of what we consider normal, necessary or eternal is imaginary. If so many aspects of our shared life are the products of our imagination, of what other life, together, are we capable? As we imagine emerging from the pandemic into a changed world, what will the role of the imagination be? In the face of the urge to return to a “normal” that was destroying the planet and so many lives, how can we orchestrate the imagination towards fairer, more peaceful and more abundant ways of living together?
Dr. Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, where he co-directs RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice and decolonization. We writes and edits for academic and non-academic publications and (when not in pandemic) lectures around the world on the topics including the imagination, revenge, art, literature and social movements. More information can be found at maxhaiven.com.