Imagining the Future

Author: Simon Torok
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
ISBN: 1486302734
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 142

Book Description
Flying through time and flying in cars. Living underwater and living forever. Robot servants. 3D printed food. Wouldn’t it be amazing if science fiction became science fact? We’re living in a rapidly changing world. Hardly a week passes without an exciting technological breakthrough. That’s the power of human innovation – it never stops happening. Inventors keep inventing. Get prepared for the fantastic future with this guide to the unbelievable and incredible inventions just over the horizon. Invisibility, instant transportation, holograms and lots of gadgets were once the dreams of science fiction ... now they might become science fact! Imagining the future is the first step in arriving there. If you can dream it, perhaps one day you can invent it. Strap yourself in and get ready for the future!

Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy (Easyread Large Edition)

Author: Yuval Levin
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458763544
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
From stem cell research to global warming, human cloning, evolution, and beyond, political debates about science in recent years have fallen into the familiar categories of America's culture wars. Imagining the Future explores the meaning of science and technology in American politics today. The science debates, Yuval Levin argues, expose the deepest strengths and greatest weaknesses of both the left and the right, and present serious challenges to American democratic self-government. What do arguments about embryos, climate, or the origins of man reveal about contemporary America? Why do issues involving science seem to divide us along the same fault lines as so many other issues in our political life? Is science morally neutral, or is it an endeavor filled with moral promise - and peril? Are American conservatives really waging war on science? Is the American left justified in calling itself the party of science? Most of the science debates, Levin concludes, are not about particular theories or facts or technologies. Rather, they come down to a profound dispute between liberals and conservatives about the right way to think about the future. Science is only one subject of this broader dispute; but today's science debates can illuminate the contours of our politics and clarify the rift at the heart of our polity.

Imagining Collective Futures

Author: Constance de Saint-Laurent
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319760513
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
It is a commonly held assumption among cultural, social, and political psychologists that imagining the future of societies we live in has the potential to change how we think and act in the world. However little research has been devoted to whether this effect exists in collective imaginations, of social groups, communities and nations, for instance. This book explores the part that imagination and creativity play in the construction of collective futures, and the diversity of outlets in which these are presented, from fiction and cultural symbols to science and technology. The authors discuss this effect in social phenomena such as in intergroup conflict and social change, and focus on several cases studies to illustrate how the imagination of collective futures can guide social and political action. This book brings together theoretical and empirical contributions from cultural, social, and political psychology to offer insight into our constant (re)imagination of the societies in which we live.

Imagining the Future of Climate Change

Author: Shelley Streeby
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520294459
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
#NoDAPL : native American and indigenous science, fiction, and futurisms -- Climate refugees in the greenhouse world : archiving global warming with Octavia E. Butler -- Climate change as a world problem : shaping change in the wake of disaster

Remembering the Future, Imagining the Past

Author: David A. Hogue
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1606088602
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Brain research is opening up our understanding of not only what role the different areas of our brain play in making decisions or in recognizing the faces of those we love, but even in experiencing God. As a pastoral theologian and counselor, Hogue values and utilizes the significant resources of the brain sciences for the work of the church in guiding, healing, and challenging persons and systems informed by our current understanding of the central nervous system. His latest book, Remembering the Future, Imagining the Past, is an especially useful resource for all those persons concerned with the practical theological arts of preaching, worship, pastoral care, and counseling, as well as those interested in how our increasing knowledge of the ways in which our brains work can help us understand and tailor our spiritual and pastoral practices in the church.

History and Future

Author: David J. Staley
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739117548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 191

Book Description
Perhaps the most important histiographic innovation of the twentieth century was the application of the historical method to wider and more expansive areas of the past. Where historians once defined the study of history strictly in terms of politics and the actions and decisions of Great Men, historians today are just as likely to inquire into a much wider domain of the past, from the lives of families and peasants, to more abstract realms such as the history of mentalities and emotions. Historians have applied their method to a wider variety of subjects; regardless of the topic, historians ask questions, seek evidence, draw inferences from that evidence, create representations, and subject these representations to the scrutiny of other historians. This book severs the historical method from the past altogether by applying that method to a domain outside of the past. The goal of this book is to apply history-as-method to the study of the future, a subject matter domain that most historians have traditionally and vigorously avoided. Historians have traditionally rejected the idea that we can use the study of history to think about the future. The book reexamines this long held belief, and argues that the historical method is an excellent way to think about and represent the future. At the same time, the book asserts that futurists should not view the future as a scientist might--aiming for predictions and certainties--but rather should view the future in the same way that an historian views the past.

Imagining Landscapes

Author: Monica Janowski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317118650
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
The landscapes of human habitation are not just perceived; they are also imagined. What part, then, does imagining landscapes play in their perception? The contributors to this volume, drawn from a range of disciplines, argue that landscapes are 'imagined' in a sense more fundamental than their symbolic representation in words, images and other media. Less a means of conjuring up images of what is 'out there' than a way of living creatively in the world, imagination is immanent in perception itself, revealing the generative potential of a world that is not so much ready-made as continually on the brink of formation. Describing the ways landscapes are perpetually shaped by the engagements and practices of their inhabitants, this innovative volume develops a processual approach to both perception and imagination. But it also brings out the ways in which these processes, animated by the hopes and dreams of inhabitants, increasingly come into conflict with the strategies of external actors empowered to impose their own, ready-made designs upon the world. With a focus on the temporal and kinaesthetic dynamics of imagining, Imagining Landscapes foregrounds both time and movement in understanding how past, present and future are brought together in the creative, world-shaping endeavours of both inhabitants and scholars. The book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and archaeologists, as well as to geographers, historians and philosophers with interests in landscape and environment, heritage and culture, creativity, perception and imagination.

Imagining the Past, Constructing the Future

Author: Maria C.D.P. Lyra
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030641759
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
This book takes a sociocultural, developmental and dialogical perspective to explore the constructive and interconnected nature of remembering and imagining. Conceived as cognitive-affective processes, both emerge at the border of the person and his or her socio-cultural world. Memory is approached as a functional adaption to the environment using the resources of the past in preparation for action in the present. Imagination is tightly related to memory in that both aim to escape the confines of the concrete here-and-now situation; however, while memory is primarily oriented to the past, imagination looks to the future. Both are embedded in the exchanges with the social and cultural milieu, and thus theorizing them has relied on key ideas from Lev Vygotsky, Frederic Bartlett and Mikhail Bakhtin. Thus, this book aims to integrate theories of remembering and imagining, through rich empirical studies in diverse cultural settings and concerning the development of self and identity. These two groups of studies compose the subparts that organize the book.

Imagining Urban Futures

Author: Carl Abbott
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819576727
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
What science fiction can teach us about urban planning Carl Abbott, who has taught urban studies and urban planning in five decades, brings together urban studies and literary studies to examine how fictional cities in work by authors as different as E. M. Forster, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson, and China Miéville might help us to envision an urban future that is viable and resilient. Imagining Urban Futures is a remarkable treatise on what is best and strongest in urban theory and practice today, as refracted and intensely imagined in science fiction. As the human population grows, we can envision an increasingly urban society. Shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels, reduced access to resources, and a host of other issues will radically impact urban environments, while technology holds out the dream of cities beyond Earth. Abbott delivers a compelling critical discussion of science fiction cities found in literary works, television programs, and films of many eras from Metropolis to Blade Runner and Soylent Green to The Hunger Games, among many others.

Imagining the Future of Global Education

Author: Yong Zhao
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351610872
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
Imagining the Future of Global Education examines the Grand Educational Narrative (GEN) and the major institutions that shape and disseminate it. The book focuses on national visions of education and the imaginary futures that nations seek to make reality. It critiques how the GEN policy implementation process frequently turns dreams of upward mobility into nightmares. In this way, the book takes a distinctly different approach than most comparative and international education studies. Rather than being oriented toward the past and asking how education systems around the world ended up where they are, chapters in this volume seek an understanding of how various educational visions from around the world inform the present and shape the future. Following an introductory summary of important concepts from scholarship on "imaginary futures" and global education reform, the book is organized around three themes: "What Dreams are Made Of," illustrating, through three case studies, what the GEN looks like at the national level and how it operates across national boundaries; "A Dream within a Dream," considering some of the more novel trends in international education reform in order to provide insight into how dreams seem to function; and "Keeping Dreams from becoming Nightmares," comprising three thematic essays that describe trends in education policy in one or more countries. The book concludes with lessons for scholars and policymakers.