The sociological imagination is the ability to connect individual problems to broader social processes. But this connection is seldom clear or total, so it’s a mistake to portray reality with too much automaticity or exactness. Depicting social processes as unswerving causes can portray people as oversocialized and passive. But interpretive social scientists have a different aim, what Clifford Gertz calls thick description—a less clear but more colorful view of how humans interpret and assign meaning to situations. By putting problems in the most comprehensive context possible, we try to understand how people interpret and respond to their perceptions. As Epictetus famously observed, “people are not disturbed by things but by the view they take of them.” When it rains, some complain, some cheer, and some go out to play.

But the sociological imagination is typically used to study social problems, not social thriving. As a result, sociologists are better at imagining the causes of social problems than the ingredients of collective flourishing. But both orientations are needed to collectively imagine new futures and ways of interacting with each other. In Imagination: A Manifesto, the sociologist Ruha Benjamin proposes to exorcise “our mental and social structures from the tyranny of dominant imaginaries” and offer a “field guide for seeding an imagination grounded in solidarity.”

To commence our liberation from these dominant imaginaries, I describe the imaginaries and strategies of four social movements, or what Benjamin calls “incubators of knowledge.” They are: Nonviolent Communication, nonviolent resistance campaigns, positive psychology and positive sociology, and spiritual transformation (nonsectarian). My poster describes the imaginaries of interdependence and solidarity that underwrite each movement, and how each incubator of knowledge envisions human flourishing, power, and social change. For each social movement, I provide a list of print and digital resources for further study, and illustrate how each informs my assignments, pedagogy, and philosophy of teaching.

Keywords: Nonviolence, pedagogy, positive psychology, social imaginaries, sociological imagination.