Anarchival Practices:The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-imagining Custodianship of the Past

Where is the past? It is not really behind us, but with us, constantly imagined and re-imagined in public discourse through historical narrations. Using the Clanwilliam Arts Project as a case study, this volume is founded on the ‘anarchive’, a conceptual constellation that positions the past in relation to the present, bringing into view strategies to facilitate remembering beyond the colonial archive.Carine Zaayman, Anarchival Practices: The Clanwilliam Arts Project as Re-imagining Custodianship of the Past, Worlding Public Cultures (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023) <https://doi.org/10.37050/wpc-ca-01

Time, role of the past and varieties of fictional expectations: comments on Jens Beckert’s Imagined Futures

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Narrating unfinished business: the accumlation of credentials and re-imagined horizons across the life-course

This paper examines the relationship between lifelong learning and the lifecourse and draws on the findings from interviews with part-time mature learners who are either completing previous studies from another institution or returning to higher education to study further undergraduate level qualifications. In this work we position past learning as institutional cultural capital and explore the role of this past capital in enabling students to orient towards their future self (Stevenson and Clegg,2011) and realise imagined career horizons (Hodkinson, 2008). Adopting a narrative analysis, the paper outlines three emerging narrative themes, travelling, exploring and unfinished business. We need to understand a range of possible narratives that students draw upon to support successful learning and to move forward the flexibility of our student centred curriculum

The remembering–imagining system

Remembering and imagining are intricately related, particularly in imagining the future: episodic future thinking. It is proposed that remembering the recent past and imagining the near future take place in what we term the remembering–imagining system. The remembering–imagining system renders recently formed episodic memories and episodic imagined near-future events highly accessible. We suggest that this serves the purpose of integrating past, current, and future goal-related activities. When the remembering–imagining system is compromised, following brain damage and in psychological illnesses, the future cannot be effectively imagined and episodic future thinking may become dominated by dysfunctional images of the future

Imagined Past and Future: Sustainability and Museums in the Anthropocene

The purpose of this article is to analyse how the definition of a newgeological era affects museums. First, we will give an overviewof the development of the concept of the Anthropocene and itsconnections with museums. One of the most obvious responses ofmuseums to the Anthropocene is the concept of sustainable or green museums. It is a very extensive topic, of which we chose only one part,specifically exhibitions, for analysis. As a case study, we took the IfBoxes Could Talk… exhibition in Tartu City History Museums, whichwas completed as part of the Sustainable and Sustaining Exhibitioncontinuing education course at the Pallas University of AppliedSciences. The exhibition explored, on the one hand, the application ofsustainability ideas in the preparation of a practical exhibition and,on the other hand, the mechanisms of creating cultural sustainabilityusing the model of artificial cultures.Anthropocene is a term that captures extremely important aspectsof the modern world. The central idea of the Anthropocene is theinseparability of man as a biological being, nature, technology, andculture. Man himself is both part of nature and a creator of culture,a changer of nature, and a victim of technology. In fact, there is nonatural environment that has not been transformed by mankind,either on Earth or even in near space. Sustainability and considerationof the environment are deemed to be areas that ensure the seriousnessof museums in the 21st century. If we line up the most pressingproblems of the present time, we get quite a long list: climate change,the price of energy, war in the middle of Europe, the recession, thepandemic, and the rise of militant nationalism. Apparently, thisalarming list can be extended even further. The cluster crisis affectsdifferent aspects of the environment and society and naturally alsoaffects museums, where sustainability is both a requirement and anecessity.Designing a sustainable world is, first of all, related to large-scalecultural change. It is not news that a whole series of norms andvalues characteristic of Western culture are such that they do notfit into a sustainable world and are obviously the main obstacle tothe development of such a society. The expectation of continuouseconomic growth, the desire for an increasingly better and moreabundant life, the expectation of continuous renewal, and theglorification of success and competition are still the basic values ofour culture. To ensure sustainable development, changing people’svalues and behaviours, i.e., culture, is considered one of the key issues.Changing culture is a difficult and confusing task, as culture tendsto be inert and rather difficult to change. People want to preserveexisting ideas, values, and traditions. Fortunately, the situation is notcompletely hopeless. The solution is a completely different approach to the whole bundle of problems. Instead of changing culture, wehave to create artificial cultures that meet our wants and needs. It isa radically different solution to the task of culture change. Museumshave great potential to become leaders of cultural change. People trustmuseums and consider them authoritative institutions. However,how to start creating sustainable cultures is still open for the timebeing. We started by telling stories. We used the concept of artificialculture to describe purposeful cultural change. Artificial cultureoffers a new conceptual approach to dealing with and practicalimplementation of cultural change. Instead of changing the existingculture, the focus is on creating a new culture. Artificial cultureshave great potential to solve sustainability problems, as they workby changing people’s values and cultures, which are very often thecause of the problems

Learning, literacy and identity: ‘I don’t think I’m a failure any more’

The impact of participation in adult literacy programmes on learners’ identities is examined through an interrogation of their past and current experiences and the assessment of the effect of particular pedagogies. The findings show how learners’ positive experiences in their programmes had caused them to re-evaluate their previous understandings and enabled the construction of new identities as people that are able to learn. These changes had come about through the challenging of negative discourses, the creation of new figured worlds and imagined futures and the use of a learning curriculum where learners’ experiences were utilised as positive resources

Consuming gardens: Representations of paradise, nostalgia and postmodernism

This paper unravels the types of relationships people have with their gardens. This is achieved through a review of previous literature on the topic, coupled with a theoretical contextualisation which utilises postmodern concepts, notably that of Jameson's 'nostalgic return' (1989). To illustrate the relevance of these concepts to an understanding of gardening the paper turns to a number of gardening 'texts' and 'spaces' to decipher the ways in which gardens are consumed within contemporary culture. It argues that representations of gardens cohere around two key motifs: the search for paradise and the imagined return to a long-forgotten past

Tyre, a Ship: The Metaphorical World of Ezekiel 27 in Ancient Judah

This essay offers a close reading of the dirge in Ezek 27, the metaphorical description of the famed and sinking Tyrian ship. The analysis pays close attention to the symbolic world of the text, situating it within the literary and historical milieux of fourth-century BCE Judah, when Jerusalemite literati began codifying their authoritative texts into the collections of »books« that eventually became the Hebrew Bible. The essay argues that the symbolic text of Ezek 27 contributed to late Persian-period understandings of the past, present, and future cities of Tyre and Jerusalem within an imagined Yahwistic empire

Traditions and the Imagined Past in Russian Anastasian Intentional Communities

This article deals with the concept of tradition and the interpretation of the Vedic past in Russian intentional communities. The movement is based on the book series The Ringing Cedars of Russia (Zveniaschie kedry Rossii) by Vladimir Megre published in the 1990s. The main heroine of these books is Anastasia, who shares with the author her knowledge of the ancient ancestors. Some readers take her advice and build a new kind of intentional community – 'kin domain’ settlements (rodovyye pomestiya).&nbsp;The Anastasians tend to restore lost traditions, which are usually associated with Russia’s pre-Christian past. Traditional culture is understood as a conservative and utopian lifestyle that existed in the Vedic Age during the time of the Vedrus people. The commodification of local culture and tradition is one of the resources that ecovillagers try to use. The ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ labels increase the price of many of their goods and services. One of the most popular products made by intentional communities is Ivan-chay (‘Ivan tea’), declared an indigenous and authentic beverage of the Russian people