Abstract

What is imagination and how can we explore it? In this talk I focus on the imagination as an experiential tension or oscillation between different affective-cognitive states; that is a tension between mess and harmony. In this view, imagining is a playful back-and forth movement of integrating what is not there, or the uncertain, with a situation, a feeling, or an idea. 

Coming from cognitive ethnography I am concerned with how the imagination works in settings such as reading, dancing, psychotherapy, and emergency medicine. In my empirical work I study the conditions for imagination, and how those conditions are related to cognitive designs of environments, cultural norms and values as well as personality and experience. 

Specifically, I emphasise how the conditions constrain an individual’s partaking in imagining by focusing on the bi-directional links between engagement & decoupling, adaptation & deviance, making information & picking up information, fixating & freeing perception.
 

About the speaker

Sarah Bro Trasmundi
Associate Professor, PhD

University of Oslo
Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages
Literature, Cognition and Emotion Group

University of Southern Denmark
Department of Language and Communication
Director, Advanced Cognitive Ethnography Lab
Director, Centre for Human Interactivity

Background: I combine my background as a cognitive ethnographer with theory of radical embodied cognition to investigate how humans manage cognitive events in different settings such as reading, emergency medicine, dance and psychotherapy. This interdisciplinary focus emphasises how professional action underlines various forms of cognitive and social life that involves language, tools, organisational procedures, shared expertise, cultural values and social rules. Currently I am trying to identify the enabling conditions and the processes of imagination – in particular in relation to reading practices.