What does it mean to imagine today?

The 2025 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Conference invites participants to explore the many ways that imagination critically shapes, reproduces, and transforms social worlds across times, spaces, and scales through discursive and non-discursive processes and practices.

Starting with the idea of imagination as movement toward a thing, state of affairs, and/or set of ideas that does not (yet) exist, we prompt participants to ask: Who imagines? What gets imagined? Toward what ends and with what effects? How do particular imaginaries resist or engage practices and technologies of mediation?  What happens when imagination is not just linked to, but is also untethered from temporal terms and logics? What is the relationship between imagination and forms of individual and collective action, including narrative, claims-making, and other rhetorical modes? How can we understand the myriad instantiations of  imagination, creation, and critique—from innovation, construction, or invention to destruction, violence, or the reinforcement of the status quo?