Imagination in Community Engagement

Imagining is a sociocultural process, wrought of interactions, relationships, and provocations. This chapter presents theory and illustrations of that process as relational imagining—using diverse expressive media to interact, from diverse speaker/author perspectives, for a variety of important purposes, with diverse actual and implied others and environments. Drawing on practical research, the author discusses relational imagining in several places where children, adolescents, and adults struggling with extreme challenges—war, poverty, segregation—collectively employed expressive media as cultural tools to understand what was going on around them and to imagine how things might be better. Participants in community contexts used diverse expressive media, such as narratives, letters, and policy documents, to mediate relations with diverse individuals and social structures affecting their lives. Interestingly, participating children, adolescents, and adults used some media in some relational arrangements to conform to local cultural norms, but used others to imagine novel possibilities. Implications of relational imagining for human development theory and practice are considered.