Imagination as an organizing principle: from the visualizing mind to the dreaming body?

In today’s society and organizational world dreams, plans, and visions are seen as a crucial component for successful action. However, we know very little about the ongoing activity of dreaming. This research project aims to fill that gap and develop our understanding about the role of dreaming in relation to organizational and economic life.So, how can we do research about something as elusive as imagination; that which cannot be touched, seen or held in our hands? That, which as soon as we start to talk about it, we are for sure not doing? In our study about (day)dreaming we searched and found new ways of doing our research in which we could meet and jointly explore the becoming of life and important matters through experiences of imagining the new. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of dreaming and in particular his book The Poetics of Space, in which he emphasized the importance of small, intimate spaces for poetic moments to occur, we for instance decided to buy a small countryside caravan to conduct field studies. Through this inquiry into a new spatiotemporality for our research encounters we experienced how the caravan offers a rupture from the mundane ongoingness enabling us to reconnect to the moment, the place, each other and ourselves.

Projektet bedrivs vid Uppsala universitet Campus Gotland tillsammans med Jenny Helin och Pierre Guillet de Monthoux.