The analytical potential of ‘affective imaginaries’ in higher education research

ABSTRACT

This article theorises how the concept of affective imaginaries can be taken up in higher education research to turn attention to institutional affect. The discussion brings into conversation socio-cultural and affective-political readings of “social imaginaries” to argue that analytical work on affective imaginaries makes it possible to focus on institutional affect, and how institutions are embodied. In particular, the analysis suggests two related “sides” of affective imaginaries: the “affects of imaginaries” and the “imaginaries of affect”. The two “sides” of affective imaginaries are not meant to be understood as oppositional, but rather as complementary dimensions of how affects and imaginaries are entangled within higher education environments. The analytical potential of “affective imaginaries” lies in enabling scholars to not only attend to the affective and embodied components of imaginaries in higher education settings, but also highlight the potential for institutions to be sites for the transformation of affective imaginaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• affective imaginaries
• social imaginaries
• higher education

Introduction

In the last twenty years, education scholars have used the concept of social imaginaries as a conceptual approach to make sense of the imagined practices, images, ideas, and values that drive a society’s vision of education (e.g. Gale & Hodge, 2014, Hodge & Parker, 2017, 2019, Rizvi, 2006, 2011, Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, Perry, 2018, Sellar, 2013). Within education scholarship, this concept has been theorised by drawing mainly on the landmark work of thinkers such as Castoriadis (1987), Taylor (2002, 2004) and Appadurai (1996, 2000). In particular, “social imaginaries” has been taken up to investigate the spread and adoption of ideas and practices such as neoliberalism and globalisation. As Rizvi and Lingard (2010) point out, this concept has contributed to the exploration of how some social imaginings become normalised or “common-sense” in education, and how scholars, educators, and policymakers may engage in reimagining their educational visions and practices and constructing alternative social imaginaries.

At the same time, some scholars (e.g. Hodge & Parker, 2019) have suggested that the use of the concept of social imaginaries in education scholarship has been relatively limited or the concept has been taken up in rather prescriptive ways. In a recent inaugural editorial of The International Journal of Social Imaginaries, the Editorial Collective points out that discussions of social imaginaries in specific disciplines have often ignored discussions of social imaginaries in other disciplines; this is also evident in the insufficient theoretical elaboration and explanation of this concept (Editorial Collective, 2022). According to the Editorial Collective, the theoretical response to the dominant imaginary of neoliberalism, for example, “has failed to articulate the full significance of the crisis, counter the loss of collective vision, and inspire a new political imaginary” (ibid., p. 8). For this reason, they continue, there is “an urgent need to find new theoretical approaches and interpretive frameworks” (ibid.) that enable scholars to re-articulate a productive political response to damaging imaginaries.

A promising theoretical approach that has been recently proposed to explore social imaginaries in higher education is a framework that focuses on “institutional affect” (Celermajer, Churcher, Gatens & Hush, 2019, Churcher, 2022, 2023, Churcher, Calkins, Böttger & Slaby, 2023, Hush, 2019). This approach – which studies the intersection between affect, social imaginaries and institutions and draws together insights from affect theory and feminist philosophy (e.g. Gatens, 1996, 1998, 2008) – makes two important contributions to theorisations of social imaginaries in higher education. First, it helps scholars gain a deeper understanding of how affects and emotions emerge and circulate within institutions shaping and being shaped by social imaginaries; and, second, it enables the study of how alternative social imaginaries may be formulated in institutions and challenge dominant imaginaries. These contributions constitute an important development in scholarship on social imaginaries in higher education, because they pay attention to affects, the body and imagination as entangled rather than in isolation (Celermajer et al., 2019).

The aim of this theoretical paper is to explore the analytical possibilities offered by social imaginaries in higher education, and specifically the innovation of affective imaginaries, which brings an institutional focus. As noted, imaginaries are always already “affective” in the sense that affect and imagination are strongly intertwined in the visions and practices of educational institutions (Nichols & Coleman, 2020). This paper, then, draws upon recent theoretical work on the intersection between affect, social imaginaries and institutions (Churcher et al., 2023) to theorise affective imaginaries as a concept that entails two complementary “sides”: the “affects of imaginaries” and the “imaginaries of affect”. The former draws attention to the affects produced by certain social imaginaries in higher education such as, for example, the affects (e.g. fear, anxiety, hope) produced by neoliberal policies (e.g. Valovirta & Mannevuo, 2022); the latter emphasises how affects contribute to the formation of particular social imaginaries in higher education such as, for example, how affective solidarity may challenge neoliberal policies in universities (e.g. see Zembylas, 2022). Both of these “sides” highlight the analytical potential of “affective imaginaries” in enabling scholars to not only attend to the affective and embodied components of imaginaries in higher education settings, but also highlight the potential for institutions to be sites for the transformation of affective imaginaries.

A caveat before I begin: Although higher education systems around the world vary tremendously—e.g. in terms of the value given to research publications and funding, student recruitment and rankings – there are also similarities, especially in relation to the growing impact of neoliberal policies on academia and academics (e.g. Bottrell & Manathunga, 2019). My goal in this article is not to map how these challenges present themselves in different higher education systems, but rather to argue that affective imaginaries as an approach might be a useful response to examining the affective and embodied complexities entailed in social imaginaries within institutional contexts as varied as the U.S.A, Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. If my examples draw mostly from the Global North and concern neoliberal imaginaries, it is because there has beenmore research on this topic.

The paper is divided into four sections. I begin with how the concept of social imaginaries has been taken up in education scholarship over the last two decades; this is not a comprehensive literature review, but rather a discussion of the main contributions and limitations of this concept. This section is followed by discussing the intellectual influences of those thinkers cited in education scholarship, focusing in particular on Castoriadis, Taylor, and Appadurai. Next, I introduce the concept of affective imaginaries and analyse its two “sides” along with relevant examples. The final section of the paper discusses the analytical work of “affective imaginaries” as an approach, highlighting that it makes possible to focus on institutional affect, and how institutions are embodied.

‘Social imaginaries’ in education scholarship

The aim of this section is to discuss a few exemplary works that have taken up the concept of “social imaginaries” in education scholarship. These works are exemplary in two ways. First, they break new ground in terms of how they borrow the concept of social imaginaries from other disciplines (e.g. sociology, philosophy, cultural studies etc.) and apply it in the field of education; this is done as a response to the need of describing and analysing the social and cultural impact of phenomena such as neoliberalism and globalisation. Second, these works are exemplary in that they sustain a long-term engagement with the concept of social imaginaries that gradually contributes to the formulation of an approach that attempts to re-imagine educational vision, policy, and praxis.

Rizvi (2006, 2011) has been one of the first education scholars to take up the notion of social imaginary, drawing on a number of thinkers, especially Appadurai and Taylor. Rizvi (2006) draws on Appadurai to argue that the notion of imagination has important implications for thinking about educational policy research, because imagination is reconceptualised as a collective social fact in the era of globalisation, rather than an individual capacity – which used to be the traditional philosophical and sociological view of imagination in education. The view of imagination as a collective social fact entails a political struggle between, on the one hand, a dominant neoliberal imaginary underpinning educational policy, and on the other hand, an alternative that is conceived as a radically different way of interpreting the facts of globalisation and interdependence. In his subsequent work, Rizvi (2011) uses Taylor’s concept of social imaginary in conjunction with Huntington’s notion of “clash of civilisations” to explore the popular appeal of civilisational conflict and its underlying imaginary, as opposed to an alternative social imaginary, acquired through cosmopolitan learning.

Rizvi and Lingard’s (2010) influential book on globalisation and education policy provides perhaps the most extensive analysis of the concept of imaginary in the field of education. Unlike other works that invoke this concept without theorising it adequately, Rizvi and Lingard’s analysis explicitly considers the concept of social imaginaries and sets it within a broad discussion of globalisation and neoliberalism (Hodge & Parker, 2019). In particular, Rizvi and Lingard invoke Taylor’s definition of social imaginary as the ways in which people imagine their social existence together, while taking into consideration normative expectations, to explain how globalisation develops new social imaginaries in education:

Globalization has produced not only material economic shifts, but also a changing set of identities and belonging. It has done this, we argue, through the development of a social imaginary about how the world is becoming interconnected and interdependent, an imaginary that now guides and shapes people’s sense of the options for organizing conduct (Rizvi & Lingard 2010, p. 34).

For example, a neoliberal imaginary in higher education around the globe is driven by certain values (e.g. competition, individualism, economic efficiency) in academic hiring and promotion, student recruitment and research aims (Valovirta & Mannevuo, 2022). As Hodge and Parker (2019) observe, Rizvi and Lingard’s global imaginary seems to overlap with Taylor’s imaginary of the public sphere. Rizvi and Lingard criticise how the neoliberal imaginary along with its moral vision have reoriented values in education from a focus on democracy and equality to the values of efficiency and accountability. Importantly, Rizvi and Lingard argue that the neoliberal imaginary of education needs and can be changed for the better. As they write,

The transformation of a social imaginary is of course never easy to achieve, requiring a range of formal and informal strategies to shift the popular images that people associate with discourse and practices that are sometimes expressed explicitly, but mostly not (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, p. 34).

Their proposal is that an alternative counter-imaginary needs to be formed that will emphasise cosmopolitan learning. They explain that,

This competing and new imaginary will emphasize cosmopolitan learning that does not “ontologize” market logic and the self-capitalizing individual, but seeks to work with a different moral sense of people’s “situatedness in the world”, in ways that are both critical and reflexive. This imaginary would recognize the social and cultural nature of human behavior and being, as well as concern for the collective common good within an environmentally sustainable politics (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, p. 201).

This counter-imaginary (which alludes to both Taylor and Castoriadis’ theories of social imaginary) is also discussed in the work of other education scholars such as that of Gale and Hodge (2014) who suggest a “just imaginary” in transformations to policy and practice in higher education. Gale and Hodge draw on Taylor’s work to conceptualise their idea of “just imaginary” as required for more inclusion in higher education. Also, Sellar (2013) cites Castoriadis, Appadurai and Taylor to explore the influence of marketers on the emergence of social imaginaries, focusing in particular on “how marketers target the experiences of young people as sites through which to access and modulate social imaginaries” (2013, p. 35). Finally, Hodge and Parker (2019) draw on Taylor’s theory of social imaginaries to outline its implications in education research, particularly in relation to informing methodologies for understanding and critiquing education practices. Hodge and Parker suggest that the concept of social imaginaries offers important tools to critical education researchers to criticise the neoliberal framing of education, but this research is still at its beginning stages. As they argue, a more systematic development of a methodology of imaginaries in education research may help deepen the critique of neoliberal and other modernist agendas and construct viable alternative counter-imaginaries.

All in all, what could be called the “socio-cultural strand” of theorising social imaginaries in education points to several trends that are concerned with the use of social imaginaries as an analytic concept to understand particular phenomena, mainly neoliberalism and globalisation. In particular, there are two important insights emerging from the socio-cultural strand. First, there is a concern with – and emphasis on – imagination as a socio-cultural phenomenon rather than an individual psychic one; although there is not always a distinction between imagination and imaginary, the underlying idea of creativity and its transformative potential is seen as the workings of socio-cultural processes. Second, the conceptualisation of social imaginaries is primarily rooted in socio-cultural theories – e.g. the role of images and imagination in social life (Appadurai) or imagination as culture (Taylor). Social imaginaries are understood as collectively instituted meanings intertwined with social and cultural practices; although this foregrounding of imaginaries provides a corrective to an earlier over-emphasis on reason and individualism in the field of education, it is interesting to observe that there is no recognition of the role of affect and emotion as entangled with socio-cultural and political processes.

While this section has shown what social imaginaries in education is a response to – i.e. the analytical problematic of social and cultural phenomena in education such as neoliberalism and globalisation – the next section focuses on the intellectual influences of the thinkers from whom education scholars have drawn their inspiration.

A brief genealogy of ‘social imaginaries’

An exhaustive account of the intellectual history of social imaginaries would be extremely difficult to assemble, because there are many varieties and variations of this concept across the disciplines (Stankiewicz, 2016). As Adams, Blokker, Doyle, Krummel, and Smith (2015) explain, the social imaginaries field is very heterogeneous, because there have been numerous intellectual sources and currents that inform theorisation of social imaginaries – ranging from the sociological tradition (e.g. Durkheim, Mills, Anderson), the philosophical tradition (e.g. Kant, Ricoeur, Castoriadis) to cultural studies (e.g. Appadurai, Taylor), to name just a few examples. My much more limited goal in this section is to set forth what I discern to be the most significant articulations of social imaginaries that have influenced the field of education since the early 2000s when the term initially appeared. In particular, I discuss the conceptualisations of social imaginary by Cornelius Castoriadis, Charles Taylor, and Arjun Appadurai, respectively, as these thinkers seem to be cited more systematically in education literature during this time period (Hodge & Parker, 2019). As noted earlier, the uptake of these conceptualisations in the field of education is “socio-cultural”, because it is mainly influenced by social and cultural theories of the social imaginary.

Castoriadis (1987) has been influential in conceptualising the notion of social imaginaries as a fundamental way of understanding societies. Social imaginaries, according to Castoriadis, mould societies, and give a specific orientation to them. These imaginaries are not simply images or representations of something, but rather “the organising patterns that are the conditions for the representability of everything that the society can give to itself” (1987, p. 143). The social imaginary, then, refers to the underlying conception of society that ties together a particular configuration of ideas, symbols and practices – for example, the social imaginary that higher education or work were incompatible to women’s roles as wives and mothers prevented women from attending universities or entering the labour market until well into the 20^th century. In this sense, the social imaginary is “the invisible cement holding together this endless collection of real, rational and symbolic odds and ends that constitute every society, as the principle that selects and shapes the bits and pieces that will be accepted there” (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 143).

For women to have access to higher education, the “actual social imaginary” has to change, hence Castoriadis (1987) suggests the idea of “radical imaginary”, namely, the force that is capable of formulating new significations that challenge existing forms of social doing. Therefore, social imaginaries for Castoriadis are part of an open-ended process that is always situated in specific circumstances and contexts. In this sense, the construct of the social imaginary oscillates between “given structures, ‘materialised’ institutions and works […]; and, on the other hand, that which structures, institutes, materialises” (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 108, emphasis in original). This oscillation between the “instituted society” and the “instituting society”, that is, between sedimentation and creativity, demonstrates that for Castoriadis the social imaginary needs to be understood as a dynamic construct that is in constant flux, thus capturing the contingency that characterises societies and its social institutions.

While Castoriadis offers a conceptual framework for capturing the oscillation between actual and radical imaginary, Taylor (2002, 2004) takes on what constitutes modern (i.e. western) social imaginary. As he writes:

By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations (Taylor, 2002, p. 106; 2004, p. 23).

For Taylor, then, social imaginary is not a set of ideas, but rather a way of describing and evaluating how ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings – as this is carried in images, stories and legends – that is, a common understanding that enables the common practices that make up our social life. Taylor does not explicitly engage with Castoriadis, but rather one of his key intellectual sources is Anderson’s (1991) notion of “imagined communities”, particularly Anderson’s emphasis on imaginaries as a person’s self-understanding of how we fit together with others (Adams, Blokker, Doyle, Krummel, & Smith, 2015, Stankiewicz, 2016). Given that social imaginaries for Taylor are both descriptive and evaluative, one could argue that his conceptualisation is compatible with Castoriadis’ distinction between the instituted and the instituting society. As Taylor writes:

[P]eople take up, improvise, or are inducted into new practices […] [A] new understanding comes to be accessible to the participants in a way it wasn’t before. It begins to define the contours of their world and can eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention (2004, p. 29).

Taylor argues, then, that it is impossible to talk about a unique social imaginary in modernity, because there are multiple imaginaries that may be mobilised as part of a political project. The three broad spheres of social practices that institute modernity and characterise what Taylor calls “Western modern social imaginaries” are: collective self-governance; the market economy; and the public sphere (Adams, Blokker, Doyle, Krummel, & Smith, 2015).

The idea of imagination as an impetus for action – in a way that is analogous to Castoriadis’ understanding of imaginary (Stankiewicz, 2016) – is central to Appadurai’s (1996, 2000) account of globalisation and modernity. According to Appadurai, globalisation is not simply about a market economy that spreads around the globe, but it is marked by the new role that imagination plays in modernity. As he writes:

Ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives. This fact is exemplified in the mutual contextualizing of motion and mediation […]. More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates of migration at every level of social, national, and public life (Appadurai, 1996, p. 6).

Appadurai explains further that the new role of imagination in modernity includes three important elements that seem to capture both Castoriadis and Anderson’s ideas, namely, images, imagined community and imaginary:

The world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the imagination in social life. To grasp this new role, we need to bring together the old idea of images, especially mechanically produced images (in the Frankfurt School sense); the idea of the imagined community (in Anderson’s sense); and the French idea of the imaginary (imaginaire) as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations, […]. The image, the imagined, the imaginary—these are all terms that direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes (Appadurai, 1996, p. 31).

As Stankiewicz (2016) explains, for Appadurai, images (media) are both distinct from imagined community and the social imaginary, but all together are constitutive of imagination. Imagination, therefore, involves a collective social force that is always multiple and stretches across communities. It is through this collective sense of imagination, according to Appadurai, that a society is created and gains coherence and identity – an idea that is reminiscent of both Castoriadis’ imaginary and Anderson’s community.

Needless to say, this brief discussion of the contributions of Castoriadis, Taylor and Appadurai is incomplete. However, it illustrates the value of these contributions in identifying how social imaginaries are formulated, mobilised and condition practice, while also acknowledging that social imaginaries are in flux. In this sense, it is important to emphasise that social imaginaries are seen not only as reproductive, but also as forms of social creativity and transformation (Editorial Collective, 2022). In other words, if “social imaginaries” is seen as an approach through which scholars identify and analyse competing collective imaginings (e.g. neoliberalism vs. inclusion and equity), then it is possible to argue that social imaginaries can open possibilities for imagining education differently. The argument here is not whether social imaginaries as an approach should be adopted, rather than “discourse” approaches or other socio-cultural approaches such as activity theory or political science approaches such as cultural political economy. Each approach responds to a different analytical problematic. The next section of paper presents the analytical possibilities offered by social imaginaries and specifically the innovation of affective imaginaries; the notion of affective imaginaries, I argue, enables scholars to pay attention to institutional affect, and how institutions are embodied.

Theorizing ‘affective imaginaries’ in higher education research

As noted so far, scholars across fields and disciplines have been interested in social imaginaries as an approach that maps the ways in which collective imaginings are constructed and performed in the world. Although there have been various theorisations of social imaginaries by different thinkers over the last few decades, imaginaries share a common concern: the collective imagination of a different future (Nichols & Coleman, 2020). In this sense, imaginaries are not neutral, but rather deeply political, in that they reveal particular arrangements of power and (often competing) visions about the desired world in the future. In other words, the tensions between different imaginaries in academia entail power dynamics that play a significant role in either sustaining the status quo or challenging it. For example, neoliberal visions of efficiency and accountability in education compete with commitments to equity and inclusion (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). This means that issues of power and agency are central in social imaginaries, because the tensions between competing imaginaries expose the power relations involved as well as the agency of different social actors (e.g. academics) to challenge existing power structures in higher education environments. Social imaginaries as an approach, then, offers possibilities to analyse how or why this approach may create openings for different imaginaries.

Importantly, imaginaries are also affective in the sense that imaginative acts are fundamentally affect-laden, that is, imagination always entails affects and emotions in visions of the world (Gatens & Lloyd, 1999). I propose, then, the notion of affective imaginaries as a conceptual resource that denotes how individuals and collectives “feel” the world and imagine their future affectively. In particular, “affective imaginaries” is taken up here as an analytic tool that is mobilised in two ways: first, to identify the affects and emotions generated by concrete imaginaries (e.g. neoliberalism) in higher education settings; second, to attend to how affects (e.g. solidarity, political anger) might condition or contribute to the formation of alternative imaginaries (e.g. counter-imaginaries for a more inclusive and equitable future in higher education). The distinction between these two “sides” of affective imaginaries is not meant to be ontological but rather analytical. The analytical purchase of an approach based on affective imaginaries is to examine more precisely how affects are mobilised in social imaginaries (i.e. power and agency are involved), and specifically how their institutional emergence or uptake enable scholars to more adequately understand the ways in which certain affective imaginaries might resonate with or challenge norms in academia such as “research excellence”, “academic productivity” or “time management”.

In other words, the concept of affective imaginaries offers analytic utility, because it enables scholars in higher education to illuminate the affective dimensions of social imaginaries as entangled with politics, power and agency. For example, the affective imaginaries of time management in neoliberal academia might entail feelings of vulnerability, stress and anxiety that are deeply embedded in the material structures and normative practices of contemporary universities (Valovirta, Mannevuo, 2022). These structures and practices privilege the interests of neoliberal politics at the expense of academics, who feel increasing pressure to do certain things to survive in academia (Brunila & Valero, 2018). Analysis of the two “sides” of affective imaginaries, then, offers analytical possibilities to explore how affects, imaginaries and politics are intertwined, thus adding another layer of understanding what complicates efforts for systemic change in higher education. In what follows, I discuss each of these two sides (along with examples from the literature) and the analytical possibilities they offer to higher education research.

The first “side” of the concept of “affective imaginaries” is the “affects of imaginaries”, namely, the affects emerging within institutional imaginaries such as anxiety, shame, and anger, to name a few examples. This side of “affective imaginaries” concerns how affects and emotions are produced in specific higher education settings in which different modalities (e.g. material structures, social actors, policies, management forms) come together. For example, Brunila and Valero (2018) suggest that neoliberal governing in academia generates the affects of anxiety and precarity. Although their analysis does not refer to social imaginaries, Brunila and Valero provide a clear indication of the affective norms embedded in neoliberal academic visions. As they write, “the neoliberalization of academia is not just a change in policies, management forms, and financing schemas”, but rather “it is to be found in the very same stories of anxiety” through which academic subjects “are instantiated, and in the intensities it produces in bodies and material arrangements” (Brunila & Valero, 2018, p. 76). In other words, affective imaginaries as the ‘affects of imaginaries’—in this case, neoliberal social imaginaries in academia – are historically, socially, spatially and politically situated in specific institutional settings that produce certain affects.

There are already studies showing the affects produced by neoliberal policies in higher education (e.g. see Askins & Blazek, 2017, Brunila & Nehring, 2023, Valovirta & Mannevuo, 2022). What “affective imaginaries” as an approach adds to this research is that it enables scholars to pay explicit analytic attention to how and why particular affects are produced in higher education environments, and what their consequences are on academics and academic work. Hence, “affective imaginaries” as an approach that invites scholars to examine the “affects of imaginaries” provides two important insights: first, it shows how social imaginaries in higher education are both affective and political in the sense that they entail relations that shape and are shaped by certain images, narratives, metaphors, and other socially shared significations within an institution; second, it demonstrates which affects emerge from/within certain historical, social, spatial and political conditions and relations in specific higher education institutions. Both insights emphasise that the affective experiences generated during social processes of constructing imaginaries within an institution require attention, especially in relation to their consequences, helping scholars identify how certain affects and emotions may provide transformative power to disrupt dominant affective economies in academia (Churcher, 2022). Hence, identifying these affects and emotions may be the first step in examining the harmful effects of particular institutional policies. As we are all trapped in certain affective imaginaries in academia, it is crucial that we first recognise those affects and their consequences in order to begin the process of imagining a better world and taking action to change dominant imaginaries.

The second “side” of the concept of “affective imaginaries” is “imaginaries of affect”, namely, how affects compose an important element of imaginaries within higher education environments, such as, for example, how affective solidarity or political anger may contribute to forming alternative affective imaginaries that challenge dominant imaginaries (e.g. neoliberalism) in academia (Zembylas, 2022). Affective imaginaries as an approach, then, compels educators and education scholars to investigate the ways that affects bind or dissolve particular social imaginaries in higher education. This approach enables educators and education scholars to raise questions that are more historical-political rather than ontological (cf. Bosworth, 2022) such as: How is it possible that certain affective conditions, encounters and materialities in higher education institutions “endure despite conditions of continual change” (Martin & Secor, 2014, p. 431)? Which kinds of affective conditions, relational encounters and materialities increase or diminish the power and agency of which institutional actors to perform which institutional imaginaries? Do these imaginaries have any affective patterns that “can be recalibrated or rearranged” (Bosworth, 2022, p. 6) by institutional actors and institutional materialities?

Part of the reason this “side” of affective imaginaries might be particularly useful, especially in this historical moment, is because it enables educators and education scholars to examine how affects become attached to social imaginaries that might be reproductive or transformative. For example, exploring the imaginations and practices that are constructed and performed in higher education institutions through affective solidarity against neoliberal policies might be a form of organisation of desire that could nurture oppositional social imaginaries (e.g. see Askins & Blazek, 2017). While from the perspective of “affects of imaginaries” the emphasis would be on the affects produced by certain social imaginaries in institutional settings, from the perspective of “imaginaries of affect” the emphasis would be on the affective conditions that give rise to collective imaginings that might be transformative in higher education. Needless to say, the direction of this potential transformation is not predetermined; this is precisely why an “affective imaginaries” approach is so useful, because it reveals the ways that affects, collective imaginings, and power relations are shaped and shape institutional trajectories.

Nichols and Coleman (2020) offer a useful analytic process for identifying affective imaginaries as part of an empirical approach. In particular, they investigate affective imaginaries along three dimensions: ostensive, normative and performative. Ostensive refers to the observable components of an affective imaginary – for example, how certain affective attachments are manifested in the material and aesthetic features of higher education spaces. Normative refers to how affective imaginaries are concerned with the regulation of space and bodies in higher education environments—e.g. how certain norms produce safe spaces for some groups, but not for others (e.g. marginalised students or faculty from underrepresented groups). Finally, performative highlights how affective imaginaries are not only envisioned or materialised but also enacted—e.g. which actors take up or resist normative expectations in higher education settings, giving rise to certain affects that solidify or challenge these imaginaries.

All in all, affective imaginaries as an approach provides two important insights to scholars studying the ways that affects are fundamental to social imaginaries in higher education: first, it shows how institutional imaginaries yield certain affects; and second, it demonstrates how affects constitute a crucial element conditioning institutional imaginaries in higher education, especially counter-imaginaries invoking different collective imaginings. While each “side” of affective imaginaries turns attention to a different perspective of the relationship between imaginaries and affect, the concept of “affective imaginaries” as a whole encompasses an expansive set of analytical possibilities for studying how affective investments are attached to collective imaginings that may sustain or challenge the status quo in higher education environments. In the final part of the paper, I further discuss the analytical work done by affective imaginaries in higher education research, namely, how this approach makes it possible to focus on institutional affect, and how institutions are embodied.

Analytical possibilities offered by an ‘affective imaginaries’ approach: the focus on institutional affect

The analytical work done by affective imaginaries in higher education provides an approach that considers explicitly the affective and embodied dimensions of institutional imaginaries and their entanglement with power relations – an overlooked perspective in previous education accounts on social imaginaries. This approach is grounded in a concept of affect as inherently relational and inextricable from an approach to power (Slaby, 2019, Slaby & Mühlhoff, 2019), as well as a conceptualisation of embodiment as fundamental in the formation of social imaginaries in institutional settings (Celermajer, et al., 2019). In particular, this approach studies higher education as an embodied institution and explains how and why social imaginaries matter affectively and politically (Churcher, 2022, 2023). This approach also foregrounds higher education institutions as crucial sites for moulding and remoulding individual and collective affects, habits, and imaginings that entail institutional visions and policies that can be either reproductive or transformative (Celermajer, et al., 2019). In other words, this approach enables scholars to explain how social imaginaries in higher education open up or foreclose particular possibilities for institutional change. In what follows, I offer a brief sketch of existing research, and discuss the new analytical possibilities opened by affective imaginaries as an approach in higher education research.

As noted earlier, the concept of affective imaginaries is understood in terms of the entanglement between affect, imagination and power relations. The work of feminist and affect theorists such as Moira Gatens (1996, 1998, 2008) provides the theoretical grounding of this entanglement. As Churcher explains:

Gatens’ account of the imaginary is especially valuable for the close attention it pays to the imbrication of imagination and affect with wider social and material structures, and how these phenomena combine to differently enable and constrain particular social actors and their powers of action (2023, p. 146).

For Gatens, the concept of social imaginary captures the idea that the formation of imagination is a social and political process that binds together individuals affectively, yet there are possibilities to break free from the influence of dominant social imaginaries. The social imaginary – which includes the images, narratives metaphors, and other socially shared significations that prevail within a particular community (Gatens, 2008) – is both affective and political. Similarly, “affective imaginaries” as an approach is “political” in that it entails possibilities to interrogate shared habits of perception, feeling and behaviour within a higher education setting. This approach, then, highlights the affective and imaginative dimensions of academic life and helps education scholars understand how cultural meanings, norms and affects motivate social actors to take action that reiterate or disrupt certain social imaginaries within institutional settings. For example, the task of disrupting dominant social imaginaries in higher education environments that might have harmful effects on academics—e.g. neoliberal policies rooted in the values of efficiency and accountability – requires careful attention to the institutional affective norms and practices that embed and condition these social imaginings.

Churcher (2022, 2023) argues that the social imaginaries governing higher education and academic research, especially in the aftermath of neoliberal reforms, are embedded within a cluster of sexual, racial, moral, political, economic, national and international imaginaries. These imaginaries vary cross-culturally, yet they structure a “common sense” of what is considered to be valuable, important and appropriate in the academy, leading to certain sedimentations of social imaginings (Celermajer, et al., 2019). The entanglement of the imaginary with the material and affective aspects of institutional life in higher education, explains Churcher (2023), is always situated historically and contextually. Attending to this entanglement is crucial for a fuller understanding not only of how affective and political dynamics become entrenched in academic institutions, but also of how it is possible to challenge inequalities of power and privilege across race and gender (Churcher, 2022). As she writes:

[I]nstitutions like the academy that are central to the production and dissemination of knowledge emerge from, and respond to, collective imaginings of certain voices and standpoints as epistemically valuable and authoritative, and function, in turn, to mediate shared habits of imagination and feeling that govern everyday epistemic practices (2022, p. 898).

Churcher explains that relations of power are intertwined with affect, habits and embodiment in academic institutions, rendering some social imaginaries (e.g. individualism, competition) gradually dominant. To challenge this dominance, it is important – among other things – to construct new affective imaginaries that begin to imagine a different academia (e.g. based on values of equity and inclusion).

Importantly, Churcher (2023) reminds us that re-imagining the world otherwise is not an individual process but rather a collective one. For example, this process may be “geared towards bringing marginalised imaginaries and their material supports from the periphery to the centre, and working to gradually establish new affective investments in support of deep normative change” (2023, p. 155). What an approach on affective imaginaries offers, then, is that these changes at the material level have to go hand in hand with changes at the affective and embodied level, because “the material, symbolic, and embodied aspects of institutional life tend to be deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing” (Churcher, 2023, p. 155). Hush (2019), for example, argues that universities can be sites for the transformation of dominant sexual imaginaries, but this process needs to be accompanied by both affective and material changes.

All in all, the unique contribution of affective imaginaries as an approach is that it offers a conceptual framework that foregrounds an institutional focus on affect. As Churcher et al. (2023) explain:

By emphasizing institutional affect, we draw attention to affective phenomena such as affective dispositions, emotional attachments, atmospheres, and bodily postures that are tied to the entire cluster of relations, material constellations, and normative and discursive practices in an institutional setting. This conceptual framework recognizes that the affective comportment and experiences of institutional actors always emerge against the backdrop of social and material configurations and are tied to fields of social meaning and power (p. 3, original emphasis).

This approach, then, explicitly theorises the ways in which affect and emotion shape (and are also shaped by) institutional arrangements in higher education environments, including the social imaginaries embedded in these arrangements. Hence, the framework of affective imaginaries with its institutional focus enables educators and education scholars in higher education to unpack the various elements that produce particular affective formations and attachments in institutional settings – e.g. affective attachments (or detachments) to neoliberal social imaginaries. For example, it enables educators and education scholars to ask: What makes some academics create affective attachments to some imaginaries? What does it take to make academics become detached from these imaginaries? What are the affective, political and other costs paid by these affective investments? My point here is not to add another concept in a long list of theoretical ideas about social imaginaries; rather, this approach offers conceptual clarity, specificity and explanatory power to theorising how social imaginaries in higher education become affectively sedimented or transformed.

Conclusion

This article has sought to propose and theorise how the concept of affective imaginaries can be taken up in investigations of social imaginaries in higher education. The analysis has brought into conversation socio-cultural and affective-political readings of social imaginaries in order to consider analytical possibilities for research in higher education. The article builds on recent research that studies institutional affect and suggests two related “sides” of affective imaginaries by examining the “affects of imaginaries” and the “imaginaries of affect”. The two “sides” of affective imaginaries are not meant to be understood as oppositional but rather as complementary dimensions of the entanglement between affects and imaginaries. Understanding how these two sides are manifested empirically within higher education settings will help educators and education scholars design policies and practices that modify existing affective relations and norms in order to perform the imaginaries that are resonant with alternative social imaginings.

In conclusion, attention to affective imaginaries as an approach in higher education research gestures towards much-needed ways for examining the consequences of affective attachments to particular institutional imaginaries. The study of affective imaginaries will enable educators and education scholars to rethink the subjectivities of institutional actors otherwise, and the recognition of the dynamic entanglement of imaginaries and affects will become the first step for identifying the affective force of collective imaginings in higher education institutions. I argue, therefore, that this approach adds analytic power to existing approaches of studying education institutions. I hope that future empirical research on the affective imaginaries of higher education in different settings will provide insights into aspects of the affective life of academic institutions that have not been studied so far.

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Michalinos Zembylas

Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, Honorary Professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and Adjunct Professor at the University of South Australia. He has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. His recent books include: Affect and the rise of right-wing populism: Pedagogies for the renewal of democratic education, and Higher education hauntologies: Living with ghosts for a justice-to-come (co-edited with V. Bozalek, S. Motala and D. Hölscher). In 2016, he received the Distinguished Researcher Award in “Social Sciences and Humanities” from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.