ABSTRACT
Does imagination have a political dimension? If a significant aim of contemporary democracies is to promote the self-determination of citizens by ensuring certain crucial freedoms, imagination can be deemed as an important avenue for expanding the scope of agency. After all, it is through our imaginative faculties that we can envision our current and future contexts from more diverse frames of reference, and develop a broadened lens with which to approach and assess our lived experience. Without imagination, we run the risk of limiting our agency through a narrow, impoverished outlook that restricts our sense of opportunity and our potential to lead meaningful, fulfilling lives. In turn, we may lack the imaginative resources to see ourselves as capable agents who can contribute to enhancing the political landscapes in which we find ourselves, simply by living out and embodying the freedoms we have envisaged as most valuable. To illuminate this political dimension of imagination, the Capabilities Approach (CA) has a
lot to offer as a highly influential theoretical paradigm of human development. Since the 1980s, leading advocates of CA like Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have striven to redefine how we assess the wealth of communities based on what people are actually able to achieve within their set of circumstances, focusing on the opportunities to enact desired freedoms in ways that honor agency and dignity. In light of its major political influence, notably toward the formation of the United Nations’ Human Development Index, a summary measure of average achievement across areas like health, knowledge and standard of living, CA and its distinctive methods of assessing human welfare can give insight into what it might mean to conceive imagination politically as a capability. Of course, many proponents of CA have understandably focused on the protection and
promotion of basic capabilities, notably in relation to serious issues of global justice such as the alleviation of poverty and the eradication of health inequalities. Ultimately, basic capabilities are what translate into the capacity for survival; for Sen, they represent “the ability to satisfy certain elementary and crucially important functionings up to certain levels” (Sen 1992, 45). Less conceptual attention has extended to the complex capabilities that contribute to agency development or, as John Davis phrases it, on “what it means to be and develop as an individual” once survival needs are met (Davis 2009, 427). This chapter is dedicated to one such complex capability – the capability of imagination – and the ways it can contribute to our agency by expanding and enriching our envisioned options for the lives we have reason to
value. The chapter begins with an overview of CA in the context of agency development, then considers imagination as a complex essential capability with a particular focus on Nussbaum’s work, and ends with a look at the educational potential of imagination for children.
