Although philosophers have long claimed that reading fiction has the potential to improve imaginative capacities, empirical evidence on this topic is limited. We report an experiment that aims to conceptually replicate and extend previous work by Djikic and colleagues by testing whether reading literary fiction reduces the need for closure, and by…

Educational technology is the focus of increasing financial investment. In this article, we examine how edtech investors imagine and invest in the future of higher education through an empirical case study of a UK investing company. Utilising concepts and methods from economic sociology, we analyse how investment companies engage in…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unpredicted disruption to international students' mobility, which has created challenges for the principal host and sending countries (i.e. the UK and China). This study focuses on the UK's prospective Chinese master's students who have, reluctantly, deferred their education abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic and…

Imagination, as an essential aspect of human nature, is fundamental to all ways of thinking. However, this powerful faculty is usually overlooked or marginalized in educational research. In the article, I explore imagination as a methodological source for researchers to generate expansive, purposeful, fluid, and developmental knowledge about the…

This article outlines how co-production might be understood as a utopian method, which both attends to and works against dominant inequalities. It suggests that it might be positioned 'within, against, and beyond' current configurations of power in academia and society more broadly. It develops this argument by drawing on recent research funded…

Taking a lead from recent articles in "The History Teacher," the author placed history, popular culture, and historical literacy at the core of a history course entitled "Enchanted Capitalism: Myths, Monsters, and Markets." Drawing on folklore, literature, popular culture, and economics, the course explored the rise of…

We report on an action research study conducted by two mathematics teacher educators in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. The project consisted of three phases, the first two taking place in our respective teacher education courses and a final phase in which prospective mathematics teachers from both locations engaged in dialogue through a…

This article critically evaluates the attempt of the authors to develop a sociological imagination within first-year undergraduate students studying the discipline of sociology at a British university. Through a sociological analysis of biography and autobiography (of both teachers and students), we attempted to create a quality of mind that would…

The rationale for retaining the humanities in universities in the 21st century is not self-evident. A case for the humanities can only be fully made against a sense of their loss or their absence. Some say that we are already in a post-human society, but what role might the humanities play in such a society? Presumably, the fate of the humanities…

The gradual commodification of higher education in the context of an increased focus on graduate employability attributes together with evolving labour markets is creating challenges for universities and students alike. For universities, there has been significant investment in careers services and, through institution-wide initiatives,…

What is it to be a university? In what does the being of the university reside in the 21st century? To draw on a Heideggerian expression, what is its "being possible"? To address such questions seriously, we are drawn to imagine the university as it might unfold and so sketch out feasible utopias for it. But such a project of the…

This article is an introduction to two other articles in this issue, Catherine Maxwell's "Teaching 19th-century aesthetic prose" and Kirsteen Anderson's "The whole learner: the role of imagination in developing disciplinary learning". It highlights the significance of the courses described in Maxwell's and Anderson's accounts…

A proposed remedy for biased affective forecasts is to base judgments on the actual feelings of people (surrogates) currently experiencing the event, rather than using imagination which conjures an inaccurate vision of the future. Gilbert et al. (2009) forced people to use surrogate reports by withholding all event information, resulting in better…

This article explores how supervisors of teachers preparing dissertations can create a space for the imagination in the tutorial setting. The imagination is seen as "opening up to possibility," where the student is taking a step into the unknown. The article discusses how the tutor can best support this, taking the theme of "holding…

This paper argues that, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, universities have been captured by neo-liberal regimes of truth. We suggest that this may inhibit the "research imagination" within universities and, consequently, their role in the democratisation of knowledge. We consider the role of capital in the…