The Future is Unwritten
Imaginaries Culture & Violence in Brazil & Colom

The Future is Unwritten, looks at how imaginaries of violence in Colombia have come to dominate and how culture has the potential to challenge and change these imaginaries. Peoples’ worlds are constructed through collective, social imaginaries (Anderson, 1981; Taylor, 2004).

The imaginary articulates how peoples’ worlds are created through shared values and beliefs, often drawn from collective lived experiences. As such, the modern social imaginary can be formed from problematic paradigms affecting the social consciousness, such as violence. These imaginaries can dominate over a society, giving continued life to problematic dynamics from the past and restricting a community’s transition into an alternative future.

Dr Simon Dancey has worked in the cultural sector for more than 25 years, initially as a professional musician, promoter and community activist and subsequently at the highest levels of leadership and governance, as a CEO and research academic.

https://www.simondancey.com/

His research explores culture, conflict, inequality, power and the social construction of reality through imaginaries: our imaginaries and ideas and how they shape the external world and can be utilised for social transformation.

He takes a multidisciplinary approach to research, exploring how often different disciplines, ideas, epistemologies and groups can shed new light and new solutions to global problems.

This work has also explored the construction of communitarian policy initiatives aimed at enacting the social transformation of inequalities, using culture as a tool for change and a means of empowering the subaltern voice, for example, the favelas of Brazil to the working-class communities of post-industrial South Wales.

He served as a principal investigator in the four-year project Changing the Story. This focused on the design, delivery and evaluation of rights-based interventions into conflict and post-conflict contexts. In particular, the programme looked at how to support at-risk youth.

UCA Research Office

https://www.uca.ac.uk/research/Meet-the-Team/

Follow our Research news

https://twitter.com/UCAROffice

UCA Events

https://www.uca.ac.uk/Events/