ABSTRACT
Building on the foregoing analysis and critique, this chapter focuses especially on the role of naturalization in legitimating humanly costly and destructive social arrangements and in squelching sociological imagination. It also emphasizes that such arrangements, despite their current dominance, do not portend a hopeless situation. To illustrate the possibilities for a future more fully informed by sociological imagination, three examples of efforts to reimagine and reconfigure social arrangements to get beyond the limited possibilities envisioned by the functional-organismic nexus: projects 1) that position nursing home residents as experts within their facilities, 2) reshape the roles, culture and interactional dynamics in a juvenile group home, and 3) an intergenerational school in which age is largely irrelevant and learning is bidirectional between children and adults, including frail elders. Each of the projects has offered heretofore unexpected new possibilities for experience and generative human engagement, and serve as exemplars of what is possible when the force of sociological imagination is mobilized to interrogate taken-for-granted givens and freely explore possibilities for advancing human interest.
