Imagination is good---it allows us to create transformative change. But, there’s no link to cruel optimism, because it also forces us to know reality.

Imagination tends to be associated with the ability to generate ideas in the mind about things that cannot be perceived with the senses, including alternative or fictional realities. It is connected to diverse mental processes, including learning, meaning making, and creativity (Zittoun and Cerchia, 2013). Importantly, as Kind and Kung (2016) have pointed out, imagination has at least two seemingly contradictory functions. On the one hand, it is necessary to learn about the world as it is or was and to acquire new knowledge through (re)construction (Salis and Frigg, 2019)—in sum, to gain an understanding of social reality. On the other hand, imagination serves as a form of freedom from (Kind and Kung, 2016), or even resistance to, reality. Fulfilling this second function, imagination can serve as a reservoir of ideas protected from the challenges posed by various forms of rationality (Freud, 1958; Hairston, 2016) and can give rise to novelty and change. The ability of imagination to facilitate escape from reality by mentally generating alternatives, whether those are fictional worlds, utopian, or dystopian futures (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis, 2002), is key for many social change processes, especially for social movements (Hawlina et al., 2020). Together, these two functions enable individuals to both know reality and to possibly change it.

Recently, research in the cognitive sciences has focused on a specific dimension of the second function: imagination as future thinking or “prospection”—the mental processes involved in constructing scenes of the future or new experiences (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007; Szpunar et al., 2014?; Thomas, 2019). The mental processes of “future event simulation” (Szpunar and Schacter, 2018) appears to share a common brain mechanism with memory, that is, the simulation of past events and the imagination of fictional worlds (Mullally and Maguire, 2014). This link raises important questions for the role of imagination in transformative change.

To the extent that cognitive future making involves the adaptive use of experience-based information to anticipate future events (Schacter et al., 2007), the (collective) imagination might be limited by the “source material” provided by (collective) memory and experience. These constraints are particularly important for transformation processes that seek to create systemic change and require some departure or detachment from past and present states. Further, if making memories—that is, creating new source material for imagining the future—involves experiences of the world using the human senses, our sensorial limitations render imagination for sustainability transformations particularly challenging. We cannot see, touch, or smell objects, places, or creatures that could exist in alternative futures. Fiction and technology might expand this capacity in interesting ways, but those will always be guided, if not controlled, by the intentions and agendas of those who write and publish fiction or develop the technology (e.g., filmmakers or artificial intelligence specialists). However, many communities and societies are experiencing current global environmental change as a form of “back to the future” (Dillon, 2016; Whyte, 2017)—a continuation and re-intensification of social–ecological change that first arrived in the form of colonialism (Davis and Todd, 2017; Whyte, 2018; Yusoff, 2018). In these societies, memory is a source material that includes the actual lived experience of having navigated major social–ecological transformations already (Scott, 2016; Whyte, 2018).

Cognitive science also illuminates the importance of emotions in imagination processes (e.g., Duncan and Barrett, 2007), especially, as MacIntyre and Gregersen (2012, p. 193) argue that “emotion may be the key to the motivational quality of the imagined future self.” In other words, the inputs for action in the present are generated, in part, through emotions activated in response to imaginations of the future. This argument can be extended to collective visions of the future and their potential to motivate collective action in the present, that is, to generate collective agency.

So far, the growing empirical work on future thinking related to sustainability (e.g., Pereira et al., 2018; Hamann et al., 2020) needs further connection with cognitive theory if we are to understand how, for example, rules of emotional coherence within individual minds (Thagard, 2006) play out to enable or constrain visions of the future.

2.2. The social processes of imagination

Although the cognitive sciences are primarily concerned with the generative processes of imagination, the social sciences add at least two critical sets of questions regarding the nature of imagination and its role in sustainability transformations. First, how does the social, cultural, and political embeddedness of an individual’s imagination affect its content? Second, what is the relationship between cognitive imagination and social–ecological change?

Although the cognitive sciences treat imagination as a mental process, the inputs for the generation of ideas, values, scenes, and emotions in our mind are based on and influenced by our daily experiences of the social and natural worlds, including interactions with others, participation in institutions, and experiences of our embeddness within the built and natural environment. Thus, ideas regarding the future are shaped by the social, physical, and ecological realities of today (Thagard, 2014; Levy and Godfrey-Smith, 2019). Sociologists have called this the situated imagination (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis, 2002), which is conditioned, although not entirely determined, by social positioning. Personal relationships and networks, group memberships, political and economic institutions, or social norms are all external to the mind yet affect the “contours” of the imagination (Mische, 2009).

Political scientists and some futures scholars emphasize the importance of power and the potential to control and (de)mobilize imagination processes through existing structures, norms, and institutions, but they also show that the same imagination processes can, at times, break hegemonic views as the only possible reality (Anderson, 2016; Wapner and Elver, 2016), a version of Wynter's (2006) epistemological rupture. In turn, this body of work highlights how even processes with the intention to envision shared futures become important—and understudied—sites of political influence and inequality (Vervoort and Gupta, 2018). At the same time, neither cognitive nor social scientists have paid sufficient attention to nature as a factor shaping individual and collective imagination. As Milkoreit (2017, p. 3) states, “Nature is not just a backdrop to social imagination and change; it actively shapes what can be and is imagined.” In short, one’s imagination cannot just be understood as one’s own.

One of the most interesting questions related to the role of imagination concerns its potential contribution to creating transformative change. As Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis (2002, p. 324) argue, “in order to change the reality of any specific society, the imagination or fantasy is a necessary resource,” that is, imagination provides the alternatives to reality that can motivate a reordering of the way things currently exist. To understand the causal power of the imagination, it is important to connect the individual scale—my imaginations of my future and its consequences for my behavior—and the collective scale. How do individual future visions become shared and how do they affect collective behavior, normative, or institutional change? We recognize that treating the individual and collective as separate is problematic, for example, with a view toward the ways in which numerous worldviews and belief systems perceive individuals as always connected across generations in space and time (Scott, 2016). From an analytical perspective, the distinction can be useful, as it enables an exploration of the mechanisms that connect and constitute individuals and different collective groups. Thus, again, we posit that your imagination is never simply your own. The mental processes of an individual can contribute to a collective imagination process, and the vision of a collective can affect a person’s individual cognitive–emotional experience and actions.