[UPDATE] The Imaginary [March 4-5 2016; abstracts due December 21, 2015]
"The imaginary" invokes spectres, memories, what is sensed, felt, and wanted, the fanciful, visionary, shadow, illusory, what is not visible or legible, a past and a future we can not perceive. This conference features keynote speakers Mya Poe of Northeastern University and Donald Pease of Dartmouth College.
For Lacan, the imaginary is the beginning: "I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic ... and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real." For sociologist John B.Thompson, the social imaginary is "the creative and symbolic dimension of the social world, the dimension through which human beings create their ways of living together and their ways of representing their collective life."