As literacy scholars, we continually engage with the ongoing politics of imagination in everyday life across silenced histories and uncertain futures. In this article, I draw on sociocultural theories and philosophies of imagination as well as narrative and global discourse theories to argue that literacy research, in the context of social inequality, depends on our capacity to imagine otherwise and to tell and listen to stories without colonizing what is unknown and unfamiliar. I illustrate the consequences of (im)mobilizing imagination, and the effort to speak and be heard despite inequalities, by telling stories from my family’s history and by analyzing youth conarrations of their cross-cultural lives.
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