TY  - BOOK
AU  - McBride,Keally D.
TI  - Collective Dreams: Political Imagination and Community 
SN  - 9780271032405
U1  - 307/.01 22
PY  - 2015///]
CY  - University Park, PA : 
PB  - Penn State University Press, 
KW  - Communities
KW  - Political aspects
KW  - Community life
KW  - Case studies
KW  - United States
KW  - POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Celebration Florida
KW  - Keally D. McBride
KW  - Walter Benjamin
KW  - West Philadelphia
KW  - capitalism
KW  - identity
KW  - philosophy
KW  - political science
KW  - public sphere
N1  - Frontmatter --; CONTENTS --; ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --; Introduction --; 1 The Politics of Imagining Communities --; 2 A Room Full of Mirrors: Community and the Promise of Identity --; 3 Habits of the Hearth: Families and Politics in Theory and Practice --; 4 Citizens Without States? Bringing Community into Institutions --; 5 Consuming Community --; 6 Utopian Vision as Commodity Fetish: Social Imagineering in Postmodern Capitalism --; 7 Community in Practice --; WORKS CITED --; INDEX; restricted access
N2  - How do we go about imagining different and better worlds for ourselves? Collective Dreams looks at ideals of community, frequently embraced as the basis for reform across the political spectrum, as the predominant form of political imagination in America today. Examining how these ideals circulate without having much real impact on social change provides an opportunity to explore the difficulties of practicing critical theory in a capitalist society. Different chapters investigate how ideals of community intersect with conceptions of self and identity, family, the public sphere and civil society, and the state, situating community at the core of the most contested political and social arenas of our time. Ideals of community also influence how we evaluate, choose, and build the spaces in which we live, as the author’s investigations of Celebration, Florida, and of West Philadelphia show.Following in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Keally McBride reveals how consumer culture affects our collective experience of community as well as our ability to imagine alternative political and social orders.Taking ideals of community as a case study, Collective Dreams also explores the structure and function of political imagination to answer the following questions: What do these oppositional ideals reveal about our current political and social experiences? How is the way we imagine alternative communities nonetheless influenced by capitalism, liberalism, and individualism? How can these ideals of community be used more effectively to create social change?
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271032405?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780271032405
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780271032405/original
ER  -