Political imagination as political agency – exploring higher education students’ utopianising
- Anu Lainio, University of Eastern Finland
- Anna Sofia Salonen, University of Eastern Finland
In recent years, scholars have shown growing interest in political imagination and utopias in higher education. They highlight their importance at a time when universities are harnessed for national economic growth and training worker-citizens. This attention also responds to broader concerns about an ‘imagination deficit’ that threatens democratic life. Against this backdrop, political imagination matters not only as a democratic capacity but also as a way in which political agency is enacted. It refers to the individual and collective capacity to imagine social reality otherwise, inspire political action, and articulate political critique. Utopias, in turn, serve as a tool for political imagination.
This study explores higher education students’ political imagination as a form of political agency. It draws on small group discussions with students (N=86) conducted in workshops for reimagining the future food assistance in Finland. While students’ political agency is often studied through conventional and institutionalised forms of participation, this study adopts a broader understanding of politics – one that moves beyond formal institutions and electoral processes, shaped by social relations, lived experiences, and practiced, for example, through thinking and speaking politically.
Our analysis identifies a dynamic of three interrelated elements that shape students’ imaginative practices: constraints, conditions and cracks. The movement between these three elements illuminates how the political emerges unevenly in the process of collective imagination – sometimes hindered, sometimes reinforced, sometimes catalysed. We suggest that political imagination constitutes a fragile yet meaningful mode of agency. It becomes visible in how students critique the status quo, formulate alternative futures, and reposition themselves in relation to the political. We argue for the importance of political imagination and utopian thought as part of nuanced everyday forms of political engagement among higher education students, and as a practice through which higher education’s democratic role can and should be strengthened.
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Anu Lainio is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on higher education students’ political imagination and utopias, as part of the project ‘Utopias from the breadline’. Before her current position, she completed her doctoral research at the University of Surrey, UK, where she explored higher education students’ identities and media representations across different European countries. Her research interests include political imagination; media and higher education; and student identities, agency, and (in)equalities in the context of marketised higher education and a changing welfare state.
Anna Sofia Salonen works as a University Lecturer in Practical Theology at the University of Eastern Finland. She is Doctor of Theology and an associate professor (title of docent) in Church and Social studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research combines sociological and theological perspectives to explore issues related to food, religion, ethics, inequality and the food system. She is the principal investigator of the research project “Utopias from the breadline” (Kone Foundation 2023-2025) and leads a work package on nonreligion in research project “Religion, Meaning and Masculinity” (Research Council of Finland 2024-2028).