Abstract
Given possibility studies is the ‘newer’ paradigm compared to new mobilities, it deserves a separate chapter. This paradigm has, in fact, equally old if not older roots, bringing together fields as diverse as futures studies, creativity research, the psychology and philosophy of imagination, utopian thinking, wonder and wondering, etc. The sociocultural theory of the possible that places movement between positions and perspectives at its core is presented here as a key bridge to mobilities.
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Notes
- 1.
For which I am grateful to Todd Lubart and his colleagues.
- 2.
For details about its findings see Glăveanu et al. (2013).
- 3.
See Dewey (1934).
- 4.
I documented such processes in a later study of artistic creativity, for details see Glăveanu (2015).
- 5.
For details, see Glăveanu (2020b).
- 6.
For a comprehensive review see the Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible on SpringerLink.
- 7.
See Valsiner (2014).
- 8.
All of them expressions of what Dewey (1933) would call reflective thinking or thinking that considers, at once, what is actual and what goes beyond it and exists in the realm of the possible.
- 9.
Smolucha (1992).
- 10.
Roese and Olson (1995, p. 1).
- 11.
Roese (1997).
- 12.
See also Zittoun and Gillespie (2016).
- 13.
In Vygotsky (2004).
- 14.
For a review, see the handbook edited by Kaufman and Sternberg (2019).
- 15.
For a distributed account of creativity see Glăveanu (2014).
- 16.
For a broader discussion see Anderson et al. (2014).
- 17.
Copeland (2019).
- 18.
For details, see Glăveanu (2020a).
- 19.
See Rescher (1979) and his notion that ‘the domain of the possible is the creation of intelligent organisms, and is a realm accessible to them alone’ (p. 171). And, conversely, that ‘unactualized possibility is not something that we can meaningfully postulate objectively of a mindless world, that is, a world from which all mind-involving conceptions have been abstracted’ (p. 173).
- 20.
See Heidegger (1962).
- 21.
Yanchar (2018).
- 22.
See Appadurai (2013).
- 23.
Tavory and Eliasoph (2013).
- 24.
Even if, on the whole, psychology is still ‘not on the move’ (see Glăveanu 2020c).
- 25.
Gergen (2015, p. 294).
- 26.
See Seligman et al. (2013).
- 27.
That becomes formalised as: expectation → observation → discrepancy detection → discrepancy-reducing change in expectation → expectation →. A process that is continuous and often not conscious.
- 28.
See Glăveanu (2020b).
- 29.
There are resonances, here, with other sociocultural thinkers who worked on possibility, for example Jerome Bruner. He notably stated in one of his last writings, related to knowledge construction, that “In a word, one always knows the world in the light of the perspective one has chosen (or has had imposed upon one!). There are always other ways of knowing (even of seeing) it. Those ‘other ways’ constitute the realm of possibility. I want to end by insisting that this point of view toward the possible forms of knowledge and of knowledge seeking is as relevant in kindergarten as it is at the Institute for Advanced Study or at All Souls. It is what I mean by ‘cultivating the possible’” (Bruner 2007, pp. 8–9). I have come across this passage, however, long after formulating my own framework of the possible, a model indebted to the pragmatist writings of George Herbert Mead (and neo-Meadean scholarship) and the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin.
- 30.
See Gillespie and Zittoun (2013).
- 31.
Elias (2012).
- 32.
- 33.
See Venturini et al. (2012).
- 34.
- 35.
See Ozgen et al. (2011). They also propose five mechanisms through which immigration might boost innovation: the population size effect; the population density effect; the migrant share effect; the skill composition effect; and the migrant diversity effect (p. 1).
- 36.
Mihi-Ramirez et al. (2016).
- 37.
See, for example, the relatively recent proposal of ‘anticipation studies’ building on the much older and richer ground of Futures Studies; Poli (2017).
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Glăveanu, V.P. (2020). Possibility Studies. In: Mobilities and Human Possibility. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52082-3_2
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