ABS089 - Hope as fantasy in action
Theme:
1.2 Children’s development and childhood
What:
Paper
Part of:
When:
3:50 PM, Tuesday 29 Aug 2017
(20 minutes)
Where:
Convention Center
- 205 A
How:
Drawing on Vygotsky’s theory of imagination I am proposing a phenomenology of hoping as fantasy in action. Based on interviews with teenagers who are living with a somatically ill parent, I suggest that hoping plays a central role in the teenager’s attempts for upholding a conduct of everyday life. Hoping is an imaginary backdrop, against which events, demands, and moods are evaluated, and thus the fantasies involved in hoping becomes constitutive for experiencing. I apply Vygotsky’s experiential view of imaginary activities and explore the status of the “imagined” and the relation between imagining and the real, through the empirical material on hope. This work illustrates a synthesis between cultural-historical and existential-phenomenological theorizing. This is done in order to illustrate that hoping is a meaning-making effort that - in the event of parental illness - protects the hoper from despair.