[Perspectives] Barbara Prainsack: practical utopianism for healthier societies

The psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald Winnicott proposed that a child discovers his or her own self through creative play. This certainly seems to be the case for Barbara Prainsack, Professor for Comparative Policy Analysis and Director of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity at the University of Vienna, Austria. “I remember that when I was a young kid,” she says, “I played with little figurines—Playmobil—and I wrote their constitution.” It seems her interest in “how society