Cold War ImaginariesTechnology, Temporality, Culture

Explores how the Cold War continues to influence a remarkable range of projects in the arts, humanities and social sciences

• Responds to contemporary geopolitical circumstances through the lens of issues central to the Cold War, such as nuclear weapons and nuclear power; cybernetic systems; technologies of surveillance and social control; the militarisation of everyday life; the importance of history and memory as modes of (re)construction and representation
• Examines an array of key technological, military, geopolitical and sociotechnical examples in relation to their cultural and aesthetic significance
• Combines the best of contemporary international Cold War scholarship with innovative responses by contemporary creative practitioners
• Moves beyond the U.S.-Soviet binary to address the Cold War imaginary across a range of geographical and historical sites and situations
• Provides a sustained argument on and with the complexities of competing temporalities that currently shapes geopolitics, world-views and cultural production

The precarious balance of power held in place during the Cold War structured not only global geopolitics but the experience of reality itself for populations across the world. In the increasingly unpredictable multipolar world of the twenty-first century, how have conceptions of time and history forged in the Cold War come to shape and trouble our understanding of the present?

Building on the previous collection Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics (EUP, 2016) but extending further beyond the U.S.-Soviet binary and focusing in particular on questions of history, temporality, agency and representation, this new collection gathers scholars and artists who investigate the ways in which the contemporary world continues to be shaped by ideas, values and practices that had been codified, intensified and institutionalised during the decades of the Cold War.