NEWS
In this month’s blog, Dr Rebecca Bramall (ReDigIm Project Leader and Principal Investigator for the UK research team) discusses why the concept of imaginaries is central to ReDigIm.
How do people understand the distribution of wealth in our societies? How do they make sense of social mechanisms for redistributing wealth in different ways, from taxation to charity, philanthropy and mutual aid?
People’s understanding of economic issues tends to be tackled under the rubric of ‘public attitudes’, which are revealed using methods preferred by political scientists – surveys, polls and sometimes focus groups. Yet these tools have significant limitations, giving us only a partial insight into everyday economic understanding. As Liz Moor points out, ‘surveys effectively “test” people on their knowledge of concepts from academic economics, particularly macroeconomics, rather than asking them what they do know about.’ In the political arena, opinion polls are often treated as if they reveal unquestionable truths about entrenched beliefs, rather than as answers to closed questions posed ‘from within the dominant agenda of the moment.’ As Stuart Hall and Alan O’Shea put it, polls are ‘a tool in the struggle over common sense, rather than an objective reflection of it.’
Researchers in the humanities and social sciences start with a different way of conceptualizing everyday economic reasoning. Concepts such as common sense, ideology and discourse emphasize the social production of meaning and its relationship with sites of power. This starting point often directs researchers towards qualitative methods and tools, from the analysis of media texts and artefacts to the exploration of people’s everyday life worlds and communicative practices through ethnographic observation.
The ‘imaginaries’ concept at the heart of the ReDigIm project belongs to this family of terms, enabling us to posit and interrogate overarching systems of meaning that people use to make sense of redistribution and their broader social worlds. One of the reasons why we are attracted to adopting this concept in a project about wealth, payment and redistribution is that it poses a challenge to the idea of a disembedded ‘economy’ that is separate from other domains of life. As John Clarke has observed, inserting the word ‘imagined’ or ‘imaginary’ into our thinking about the economy makes it possible to interrogate this object as a product of social and political action, rather than ‘a thing apart’ which is best left to the ‘experts’.
As we have deepened our understanding of existing research on imaginaries and considered how to position our project, we are particularly drawn to two theoretical contributions: Bob Jessop’s theorization of imaginaries from a cultural political economy perspective, and Sheila Jasanoff’s defining work on socio-technical imaginaries. We propose to set these two contributions in dialogue with J. K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies paradigm. Putting the concept of imaginaries at the centre of our theoretical framework will help us navigate a number of analytical challenges that emerge from the analysis of imaginaries, including the balance between structure and agency, the interface between discourses and technologies, and questions relating to the constitution, emergence and manifestation of social meaning.
This blog post is based on a paper presented by Rebecca and Dr Mercè Oliva (PI for the Spain research team) at Media Imaginaries, an international symposium at Lund University, Sweden. To receive updates about our ongoing work, join our mailing list.