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Imagination

Titre du projet
Imagination
Description
This theoretical project aims at understanding the dynamics of imagination from a sociocultural psychology perspective. Involving various collaborations and secondary analysis of diverse data, it has so far brought to modelise the loop of imagination, understood as individual and collective dynamic, and its outcomes in terms of problem solving, development, and social change. It also aims to examine imagination in the lifecourse, as well as resources and constraints for imagining. Further issues involve the relations between imagination and learning, remembering, creativity, etc.
Chercheur principal
Statut
Completed
Date de début
1 Janvier 2013
Date de fin
01 Janvier 2026
Chercheurs
Organisations
Identifiant interne
35111
identifiant
https://libra.unine.ch/handle/123456789/1806
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  • Publication
    Métadonnées seulement
    Difficult differences: a socio-cultural analysis of how diversity can enable and inhibit creativity
    (2019-7-24)
    Hawlina, Hana 
    ;
    Gillespie, Alex
    ;
    Zittoun, Tania 
    The relationship between diversity and creativity can be seen as paradoxical. A diversity of perspectives should be advantageous for collaborative creativity, yet its benefits are often offset by adverse social processes. One suggestion for overcoming these negative effects is perspective taking. We compared four dyads with low scores on trait perspective taking with four dyads who were high on trait perspective taking on a brainstorming task followed by reconstructive interviews. Trait‐based perspective taking was strongly associated with greater creativity. However, contrary with expectation, interactional perspective taking behaviors (including questioning, signaling understanding, repairing) were associated with lesser creativity. The dyads that generated the fewest ideas were most likely to get stuck within ideational domains, struggling to understand one‐another, having to elaborate and justify their ideas more. In contrast, the dyads that generated many ideas were more likely to recognize each other's ideas as valuable without extensive justification or negotiation. We suggest that perspective taking is crucially important for mediating diversity in the generation of new ideas not only because it enables understanding the perspective of the other, but because it entails an atmosphere of tolerance, playfulness, and mutual recognition.
  • Publication
    Métadonnées seulement
    Symbolic resources and imagination in the dynamics of life
    (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018)
    Zittoun, Tania 
    ;
    Rosa, Alberto
    ;
    Valsiner, Jaan
    This chapter presents two mutually dependent conceptual developments in sociocultural psychology: the concept of “symbolic resources” and a theory of imagination. It argues that, although both have been considered as side problems, these might actually enable to highlight fundamental dynamics in the study of human development in the lifecourse, as well as cultural change. The chapter is organized five sections. The first section sketches a sociocultural psychology of lifecourse and highlights some of its challenges. The second section presents a sociocultural psychological theory, while the third retraces the concept of symbolic resources. These two sections each present a short historical summary and a theoretical model. The fourth section puts these two concepts at work, and shows how they may participate to the definition of the lifecourse and societal change, but also, how these can be constrained. The fifth section opens on further theoretical and methodological challenges.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Imagination in Human and Cultural Development
    (London: Routledge, 2016)
    Zittoun, Tania 
    ;
    Gillespie, Alex
    This book positions imagination as a central concept which increases the understanding of daily life, personal life choices, and the way in which culture and society changes. Case studies from micro instances of reverie and daydreaming, to utopian projects, are included and analysed. The theoretical focus is on imagination as a force free from immediate constraints, forming the basis of our individual and collective agency. In each chapter, the authors review and integrate a wide range of classic and contemporary literature culminating in the proposal of a sociocultural model of imagination. The book takes into account the triggers of imagination, the content of imagination, and the outcomes of imagination. At the heart of the model is the interplay between the individual and culture; an exploration of how the imagination, as something very personal and subjective, grows out of our shared culture, and how our shared culture can be transformed by acts of imagination. Imagination in Human and Cultural Development offers new perspectives on the study of psychological learning, change, innovation and creativity throughout the lifespan. The book will appeal to academics and scholars in the fields of psychology and the social sciences, especially those with an interest in development, social change, cultural psychology, imagination and creativity.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Handbook of Imagination and Culture
    (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
    Zittoun, Tania 
    ;
    Glaveanu, Vlad Petre
    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.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Imagining self in a changing world – an exploration of "Studies of marriage"
    (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2017)
    Zittoun, Tania 
    ;
    Han, Min
    ;
    Cunha, Carla
    Subjectivity is what makes a person a unique subject, different from other persons and her social environment, and distanced enough from her experience to be able to reflect upon it and create her own future. In this chapter, I will examine the life of married couples in a changing country. A country groups many individuals, and because of its social and political institutions, it constraints what is possible for people to live or want for themselves. A marriage is a curious alliance between two lives for an unpredictable period of time, which strongly canalizes each of the partners’ lives. However, a person is never reduced to his or her national history, or the story of his or her marriage: even in the tighter frame, a person keeps becoming a unique human being. This chapter is thus a modest attempt to account for the fact that, within a group of six couples married at the same time and living in the same societal conditions, each couple grows differently, and each person becomes absolutely unique… In order to explain the generation of uniqueness in such constraining forces, my proposition is to examine people’s imagination of alternatives, and their personal life philosophies.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Integrative perspectives on human development: dynamic and semiotic
    (2023-06-05)
    Zittoun, Tania 
    Werner Greve argues for an abstract and integrative theory of development; to progress toward such a theory, he suggests that evolutionary psychology can provide concepts for a processual approach to adaptation. To complement this perspective, I propose to start where the author finishes: the need to further qualify change, and to account for information. Considering ruptures and sense-making as cornerstones of a developmental approach, I recall that open dynamic approaches offer a metatheoretical frame for an integrative developmental psychology, and that cultural approaches already and always account for meaning-making to start with. Assuming these two givens, a variety of integrative propositions account for stability and change; I present an historical example, the work of Gordon Allport, and a current one, our work as sociocultural psychologists, to show how the theoretical and heuristic interest of this proposition.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    On Bartlett's (1928) "Types of imagination"
    (New Yrok: Oxford University Press, 2019)
    Zittoun, Tania 
    ;
    Glaveanu, Vlad Petre
    Known for his work on memory, Sir Frederick C. Bartlett also repeatedly wrote about imagination as part of his attempt to understand the dynamics of mind. Bartlett’s 1928 text explores autobiographical and literary material so as to identify three types of imagination (assimilative, creative, and constructive) on a continuum, depending on how much passive or intentional these are. This chapter discusses how three of Bartlett’s propositions have been taken on by research: processes of imagination, typology of people, and methodological choices. Finally, it is proposed that researchers pursue the exploration of variations of processes involved in imagination as proposed by Bartlett, as well as his original methodologies.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Imagining one's life: Imagination, transitions and developmental trajectories
    (Universidade Federal de Bahia, 2015-5-16)
    Zittoun, Tania 
    ;
    Gondim, Sonia Maria Guedes
    ;
    Bichara, Ilka Dias
    Life is not a quite river; it is exposed to curves, torrents, unpredicted turns and sometimes freezes... Sociocultural psychology gives us tool to analyze the diversity of life trajectories, and especially, the dynamics of transitions that offer occasions for learning and development after ruptures. To understand how new learning, new identities, or new life directions might emerge, it is very interesting to examine imagination. Imagination is the dynamic by which people leave the constraint of the here-and-now, and explore the past, the future and possible alternatives. A deeply social and cultural process, it is therefore the dynamic by which each person can define, alone and with others, his or her unique trajectory. Hence, through a theoretical exploration and empirical examples takes from a wide range of situations, I hope to indicate possible ways to understand and support human development.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Difficult differences: A socio-cultural analysis of how diversity can nable and inhibit creativity
    (2017-12-22)
    Hawlina, Hana 
    ;
    Gillespie, Alex
    ;
    Zittoun, Tania 
    The relationship between diversity and creativity can be seen as paradoxical. A diversity of perspectives should be advantageous for collaborative creativity, yet its benefits are often offset by adverse social processes. One suggestion for overcoming these negative effects is perspective taking. We compared four dyads with low scores on trait perspective taking with four dyads who were high on trait perspective taking on a brainstorming task followed by reconstructive interviews. Trait-based perspective taking was strongly associated with greater creativity. However, contrary with expectation, interactional perspective taking behaviors (including questioning, signaling understanding, repairing) were associated with lesser creativity. The dyads that generated the fewest ideas were most likely to get stuck within ideational domains, struggling to understand one-another, having to elaborate and justify their ideas more. In contrast, the dyads that generated many ideas were more likely to recognize each other’s ideas as valuable without extensive justification or negotiation. We suggest that perspective taking is crucially important for mediating diversity in the generation of new ideas not only because it enables understanding the perspective of the other, but because it entails an atmosphere of tolerance, playfulness, and mutual recognition.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Imagining the collective future: A sociocultural perspective
    (London: Palgrave, 2018)
    Zittoun, Tania 
    ;
    Gillespie, Alex
    ;
    de Saint Laurent, Constance 
    ;
    Obradovic, Sandra
    ;
    Carriere, Kevin R.
    The present chapter examines how groups imagine their future from a sociocultural perspective. First, we present our sociocultural model of imagination and its three dimensions, before building on it to account for how collectives imagine the future. We maintain that it is a mistake to assume that because imagination is “not real”, it cannot have “real” consequences. Imagination about the future, we argue, is a central steering mechanism of individual and collective behaviour. Imagination about the future is often political precisely because it can have huge significance for the activities of a group or even a nation. Accordingly, we introduce a new dimension for thinking about collective imagination of the future— namely, the degree of centralization of imagining—and with it, identify a related aspect, its emotional valence. Based on two examples, we argue that collective imaginings have their own developmental trajectories as they move in time through particular social and political contexts. Consequently, we suggest that a sociocultural psychology of collective imagination of the future should not only document instances of collective imagining, but also account for these developmental trajectories— specifically, what social and political forces hinder and promote particular imaginings.