About the workshop
“The only limitation is your imagination!” is a cliché – a phrase for advertising environments, services and products that offer possibilities for creative action. Yet, this banality defies many common misconceptions linked to imagination, recognizing that it is not limitless and cannot create anything from nothing. Just like any other kind of cognition, imagining cannot escape everyday experience but is, in fact, deeply embedded in it – feeding from it and into it. Similarly, fictions and art forms can coax imagination to expand into different directions, but they also restrain it through the modes and habits of expression as well as the myths, tropes and clichés they make available or salient. In this two-day workshop, we explore the affordances – the action potentials and constraints – that literature and narrative provide for imagining.
Overall, the workshop is designed to encourage interdisciplinary discourse on the embodied, extended, embedded and enactive nature of imagination as well as to make the participants more aware of the imaginary strategies employed in research and literary discourse. How could we work past harmful limitations of imagination and expand our scopes of speculation? On the other hand: how could we encourage creativity and find new affordances by constraining imagination in more purposeful ways?
Programme
On the first day, the invited guest speakers present how the questions of affordance and imagination have come together in their research. The day will conclude with a roundtable discussion that the audience is also invited to participate in.
- 2:00–2.15 PM — Welcoming words by Essi Varis & Sarah Bro Trasmundi
- 2:15–2:45 PM — Julian Kiverstein: "The Sociomaterial Theory of Affordances"
- 2:45–3:15 PM — Karin Kukkonen: "Scrivere in altre parole: Language as the ultimate literary constraint"
- 3:15–3:30 PM — Coffee Break
- 3:30–4:00 PM — Hanna-Riikka Roine: "Imagining Democracy and Narrative Fiction"
- 4:00–4:30 PM — Riikka Rossi: "The Imagined North and Emotions"
- 4:30–4:45 PM — Coffee break
- 5.00–6:00 PM — Kukkonen, Roine, Rossi, Trasmundi & Varis: Discussion on the Affordances and Constraints of Imagination
The second day comprises the more practical part of the workshop, as we conduct exercises inspired by the Oulipo tradition (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). These exercises aim to demonstrate that constraints can also stimulate imagination, when employed mindfully.
Participants
- Hanna-Riikka Roine, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Tampere University,
- Riikka Rossi, Professor of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki,
- Julian Kiverstein, Assistant Professor of Neurophilosophy at the University of Amsterdam,
- Karin Kukkonen, Professor in Comparative literature and convener of LCE, University of Oslo.
The workshop is arranged by
- Sarah Bro Trasmundi, Researcher at LCE, University of Oslo, and Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and
- Essi Varis, Visiting researcher at LCE, University of Oslo, and Researcher at the University of Helsinki.