Imagination as contested terrain: Elite futurism, disimagination politics, and education futures

In this paper we examine imagination as a capacity as it pertains to education futures, and ask what the futures young people both imagine and fail to imagine can tell us about the structural and political forces that shape futures thinking. Informed by a speculative design approach, we used the story completion method to survey young people aged 18–30 in Canada and the U.S. to generate and understand their ideas and feelings about one possible scenario for the future of higher education. We sought to gain insight into the perspectives of this group, whose contributions to education futures are often under-represented. Drawing on Giroux’s (2014) concept of disimagination politics and its relationship to elite futurism, we argue that imagination is not only a capacity but a contested political terrain: those who control what futures are imaginable shape what futures are pursued. Analyzed through Dator’s (2009) Four Futures framework, our data reveal that participants’ stories cluster almost entirely in Continuation and Collapse archetypes, while Discipline and Transformation futures — those requiring genuinely different arrangements of power, resources, and values — go largely unimagined. We argue that this absence is itself evidence of disimagination politics at work. Improving futures literacy, including critical reflexivity about how futures are made and promoted, as well as digital literacies, can support young people in becoming more skillful and creative with the future, but only if the structural conditions that constrain imagination are also addressed.