The struggle for the post-pandemic imagination (Max Haiven)

Recorded April 7 as part of the “Pivot(al): Possibilities for a Post-pandemic World” lecture series of the Third Age Learning program of Lakehead University --> https://www.lakeheadu.ca/about/orillia-campus/community-programs/tal What if we imagined the imagination as the basic building block of our society and everything in it? Take today’s increasingly digital form of money for example: an imaginary substance given value by our shared imaginative energies, but with a profound power over life and death around the world. Money is only one of many social and political institutions that depends on the imagination. Indeed, most of what we consider normal, necessary or eternal is imaginary. In the face of the urge to return to a “normal" that was destroying the planet and so many lives, how can we orchestrate the imagination more fair, peaceful and abundant ways of living together? Dr. Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice at Lakehead University, where he co-directs RiVAL: The ReImagining Value Action Lab, a workshop for the radical imagination, social justice and decolonization.