Praxis of Social Imaginaries – a Theo-artistic Intervention for Transdisciplinary Research

This research project gathers nomadic and local communities to explore and investigate travel accounts written in the medieval era. It has been argued that the social imaginaries formed in the encounters between people who stood at the centre of the establishments of medieval institutions and those at the borders of that world were of a theological imaginary, creating “racial optics” along with material extraction and exploitation of distant lands on a global scale. For these reasons this research project returns to foundational texts of such a period, asking questions about what we can learn from the past to understand the present and make changes for the future. The project uses transdisciplinary means to do research on historic texts and welcomes dialogue and encounters between different disciplines as well as the larger society by engaging in practices of listening, reading, storytelling, and community building.