Investiga tions into social imaginaries have burgeoned in recent years. From 'the capitalist imaginary' to the 'democratic imaginary', from the 'ecological imaginary' to 'the global imaginary' -and beyond -the social imaginaries fi eld has expanded across disciplines and beyond the academy. Th e recent debates on social imaginaries and potential new imaginaries reveal a recognisable fi eld and paradigm-in-the-making. We argue that Castoriadis, Ricoeur, and Taylor have articulated the most important theoretical frameworks for understanding social imaginaries, although the fi eld as a whole remains heterogeneous. We further argue that the notion of social imaginaries draws on the modern understanding of the imagination as authentically creative (as opposed to imitative). We contend that an elaboration of social imaginaries involves a signifi cant, qualitative shift in the understanding of societies as collectively and politically-(auto)instituted formations that are irreducible to inter-subjectivity or systemic logics. After marking out the contours of the fi eld and recounting a philosophical history of the imagination (including deliberations on the reproductive and creative imaginations, as well as consideration of contemporary Japanese contributions), the essay turns to debates on social imaginaries in more concrete contexts, specifi cally political-economic imaginaries, the ecological imaginary, multiple modernities and their intercivilisational encounters. Th e social imaginaries fi eld imparts powerful messages for the human sciences and wider publics. In particular, social imaginaries hold signifi cant implications for ontological, phenomenological and philosophical anthropological questions; for the cultural, social, and political horizons of contemporary worlds; and for ecological and economic phenomena (including their manifest crises). Th e essay concludes with the argument that social imaginaries as a paradigm-in-the-making off ers valuable means by which movements towards social change can be elucidated as well providing an open horizon for the critiques of existing social practices.

Amphiphilic co-solvents can have a significant impact on the structure, organization and physical properties of lipid bilayers. Describing the mutual impact of partitioning and induced structure changes is therefore a crucial consideration for a range of topics such as anesthesia and other pharmacokinetic effects, as well as microbial solvent tolerance in the production of biofuels and other fermentation products, where molecules such as ethanol, butanol or acetic acid might be generated. Small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) is a key method for studying lipid and polymer bilayer structures, with many models for extracting bilayer structure (thickness, area per lipid etc.) from scattering data in use today. However, the molecular details of co-solvent partitioning are conflated with induced changes to bilayer structure, making interpretation and modeling of the scattering curves a challenge with the existing set of models. To address this, a model of a bilayer structure is presented which invokes a two-term partition constant accounting for the localization of the co-solvent within the bilayer. This model was validated using a series of SANS measurements of lipid vesicles in the presence of the co-solvent tetrahydrofuran (THF), showing several strategies of how to deploy the two-parameter partition constant model to describe scattering data and extract both structure and partitioning information from the data. Molecular dynamics simulations are then used to evaluate assumptions of the model, provide additional molecular scale details and illustrate its complementary nature to the data fitting procedure. This approach results in estimates of the partition coefficient for THF in 1,2-dimyristoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine at 35°C, along with an estimate of the fraction of THF residing in the hydrophobic core of the membrane. The authors envision that this model will be applicable to a wide range of other bilayer/amphiphile interactions and provide the associated code needed to implement this model as a fitting algorithm for scattering data in the SasView suite.

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Vienna at the turn of the century and Berlin in the 1920s have both entered the topology and mythology of modernism. Both were doomed cultures, linked by the Great War, which destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Second Empire and gave birth in defeat to the Austrian Republic and the Weimar Republic. Vienna and Berlin mark two stages in the crisis and disintegration of the 19th-century European order and the rise of mass society and mass politics. Hitler's progress from Vienna to Berlin cannot be understood without the devastating impact of war and defeat, compounded by the burden of Versailles (war guilt, loss of territory and reparations) and the Great Depression. The crucial role of the Weimar Republic in the short 20th century (Hobsbawm) hardly needs underlining. Its importance for Germany appears more clearly when we realize that the Weimar years represent the one decisive period between 1914 and 1989 in which all the social and economic contradictions of modernization, of national and political struggles, found open expression. If the Weimar Republic is the crucial chapter in German -and European -history, the literature of the Republic likewise provides the crucial chapter in German literary history in the 20th century. It thus poses considerable challenges to literary historians, since its only unity is that of the 'age of extremes', i.e. a unity of ideological differences, which document the bitter and finally murderous contestation of the very meaning and function of literature. In the spectrum of ideological positions and the corresponding conceptions of literature and literary history of the period we can list the following: catholic, conservative, conservativerevolutionary, nationalist, völkisch, regional, racist, panGermanic, antisemitic, liberal, social democratic, communist, proletarian and so on. We are looking at a situation of incipient civil war, involving a whole series of sociopolitical divisions and reflected in a segmentation of literary production and reception, which defies any common denominator. The divisions of Weimar society

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