Essi Jouhki (University of Jyväskylä)
https://doi.org/10.58077/4MSB-YS61
Imagination has long been recognised as a central component of human cognition, development and social transformation.[1] Children make sense of their world through sensory perception and forms of imaginative engagement, constantly negotiating at the intersection of reality and imagined possibilities. Adults do this too, but arguably not to the same extent. While imagination is not exclusive to children, its immersiveness and ingenuity makes it particularly formative for childhood experience: through imaginative engagement and play, children explore their surroundings, construct meanings, and exercise agency and vision in their everyday lives.[2] In this sense, for children, imagination is not merely a supplement to experience, but a way of being in the world.
Despite the centrality of imagination across the human sciences, historians have been hesitant to engage with the intangible dimensions of the mind, reflecting persistent assumptions about the (im)possibility of accessing an ‘authentic’ historical experience. [3] This tendency is particularly striking in the history of childhood, where scholars have tended to privilege material, institutional, or socially or quantitatively observable aspects of childhood experience. Only recently has there been a growing interest in experiences that fall beyond strictly empirical frameworks, including children’s emotional boundaries, mindscapes, play worlds and even dreams. [4] As Stephanie Olsen aptly notes, the history of play, and that of childhood more broadly, is ‘about the imaginative and creative worlds of the child in a dynamic relationship with the adult’.[5] Yet these worlds and the meanings constructed through them have rarely been examined explicitly, leaving imagination itself as a methodologically and empirically problematic object of analysis. It has been dismissed as too elusive, overly speculative, or insufficiently grounded to serve as historical evidence.[6] But what if this assumption needs to be reconsidered?
Contemporary cognitive and neuroscientific research has demonstrated the close relationship between imagining, perceiving, and remembering.[7] Taking a step beyond this line of research, sociocultural psychology offers a compelling approach, in which imagination is understood as a culturally mediated activity grounded in social interaction. As Tania Zittoun and colleagues explain, ‘imagination is a process as well as an experience: it is highly contextual, develops over time, mediates action and is, at once, mediated both by culture and its various social, material, and symbolic resources’.[8] As such, the sociocultural perspective emphasises that imagination is not separate from lived experience, but actively shapes how individuals perceive, interpret, and make sense of the world. This view resonates with recent work in the history of emotions and the senses, which calls for a more integrated ‘history of experience’, where emotions, sensory perception, and cognition are understood as inseparable and mutually constitutive dimensions of lived reality.[9]
This insight invites a further question: if imagination structures experience, what role does it play in how experience is remembered? While imagination is fundamental to childhood development, the same formative years also anchor autobiographical memory, through which individuals later construct and make sense of their identities.[10] From this perspective, the entanglement of memory and imagination becomes particularly significant for historians seeking to understand how past experiences are formed, recalled, and given meaning. And in the context of the history of childhood, what possibilities might emerge if scholars were to turn their attention to where childhood is/was actually lived, experienced and constructed, in imagination?
In response to this transdisciplinary methodological possibility, I propose the concept of remembered imagination.[11] It refers to elements of imagination preserved, often fragmentarily, in autobiographical memory. These may emerge as explicit descriptions of imagined acts or more elusive traces or effects of imagination, such as forms of immersion, social intensity, or the significance of particular places and objects. Rather than attempting to reconstruct imagination as an empirical or psychological reality, the concept shifts attention to what imagination does: how it mediates children’s sense-making, world-building, and engagement with their social and material environments. In this sense, remembered imagination traces not only how imagination shaped children’s ways of living in the world, but also how these childhood experiences continue to shape adult meaning-making and identify formation. The concept also invites us to ask why and how certain imagined scenes persist more vividly than others.
I have developed this concept particularly within the history of childhood, where it offers a useful tool for examining past children’s lived experiences. A brief illustration comes from the Leikin paikat (‘Places of Play’) writing collection organised in 2021 by the Finnish Literature Society, which gathered memories of playgrounds in twentieth-century Finland.[12] It would be tempting to showcase the concept through enticing descriptions of make-believe play, but such examples can remain analytically limited. The following case instead focuses on more subtle traces, where imagination emerges through the structure of remembered experience.
In this example, a respondent in their thirties recalls a childhood playground, describing its layout, equipment and surroundings in detail. The most revealing part appears at the end, where they contrast adult and child perspectives:
As an adult, when I see a playground, I see an area with equipment meant for play. As a child, I saw a place where you could play, immerse yourself with other children for hours, forgetting everything else. The park was an important place: if we went outside, it was usually where we headed first.[13]
Here, the imaginary worlds or practices are not described explicitly. Instead, the memory retains traces of how imagination organised the experience itself. What the adult perceives as fixed equipment, the child once experienced as an entry point into immersive play worlds not bound by material form. Although the respondent suggests that adults’ perception is limited only to the physical framework, the memory itself demonstrates that adults can, at least partially, access traces of the imaginative meanings once attached to these environments.
Remembered imagination thus underscores how imagination shaped the child’s way of being in that space and how those traces have endured in memory. It draws attention to the residual impressions of imagination – sensory, affective, and interpretive – through which we can approach how children once reorganised material space into symbolic and meaningful forms. In this way, the concept probes the child’s experiential world, offering a way to trace subtle hints of how imagined worlds were structured and what kinds of meaning-making they entailed.
More broadly, remembered imagination provides a novel conceptual and methodological framework for accessing children’s experiential worlds. Although adult recollections are inevitably mediated through the present, they also preserve crucial traces of children’s imaginative engagement with their surroundings. By recognising imagination as a cultural practice and memory as an interpretive process, we may gain a more nuanced understanding of how children perceived, felt, and inhabited their environments. At the same time, the concept highlights how memories of childhood imagination may reveal deeper continuities and changes that extend across the life course. As such, it invites historians to reconsider what counts as evidence, not only in relation to childhood but also in shaping adult perceptions of reality. If imagination shapes perception, emotion, and identity, then the imaginative landscapes of childhood – even when fragmentarily preserved in memory – become historically significant.
Notes
[1] See, Tania Zittoun and Vlad Glaveanu, eds, Handbook of Imagination and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Anna Abraham, ed., The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020);
[2] Lev S. Vygotsky, ‘Imagination and Creativity in Childhood’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42 (1930/2004): 7–97; Karen Sánchez-Eppler, ‘Geographies of Play. Scales of Imagination in the Study of Child-made Things’, Reimagining Childhood Studies, eds Spyros Spyrou, Rachel Rosen and Daniel Thomas Cook (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 43, 52; Emily Gallagher, Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood and Imagination (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 2025), 9–10.
[3] For a critique of the separation of emotional, sensory, and cognitive histories and the quest for ‘authentic’ historical experience, see Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
[4] Relevant examples include Karen Vallgårda, Kristine Alexander and Stephanie Olsen, ‘Emotions and the Global Politics of Childhood’, Childhood, Youth and Emotion in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives, ed. Stephanie Olsen (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 12–34; Essi Jouhki and Kaisa Vehkalahti, ‘Reconstructed Landscapes of Northern Youth. Reading the Autobiographies of Finnish Youth, 1945–1960’, Reconstructing Minds and Landscapes. Silent Post-War Memory in the Margins of History, eds. Marja Tuominen, Timothy G. Ashplant and Tiina Harjumaa (New York: Routledge, 2021): 131–149; Stephanie Olsen, ‘The Limits of Experience? A Case Study on Children’s Dreams’, Digital Handbook of the History of Experience (2022); Kristine Alexander, Stephanie Olsen and Karen Vallgårda, ‘Voices and Sources: Lessons from the History of Childhood’, Digital Handbook of the History of Experience (2023).
[5] Stephanie Olsen, ‘Learning how to feel through play: at the intersection of the histories of play, childhood and the emotions’, International Journal of Play, 5 (2016), 323.
[6] For some exceptions within historical studies, see Sánchez-Eppler, ‘Geographies of Play’. Some further methodological experiments with the memory–imagination mixture have been conducted within children’s geography. For example, Chris Philo, ‘“To Go Back up the Side Hill”: Memories, Imaginations and Reveries of Childhood’, Children’s Geographies, 1 (2003): 7–23; Raluca Soreanu and Iulia Hurducaș, ‘Children’s Imaginaries in the City: On Things and Materials’, Children’s Geographies, 14 (2016): 422–36.
[7] Anna Abraham and Andreja Bubic, ‘Semantic memory as the root of imagination’, Frontiers in Psychology, 6 (2015): 325; Peter Zeidman and Eleanor A. Maguire, ‘Anterior Hippocampus: The Anatomy of Perception, Imagination and Episodic Memory’, Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 17 (2016): 173–182.
[8] Tania Zittoun, Vlad Glaveanu, and Hana Hawlina, ‘A Sociocultural Perspective on Imagination’, Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination, ed. Abraham, 145–146.
[9] Rob Boddice and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 30.
[10] Kate Douglas, Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory (London: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 21–23. Robyn Fivush, ‘Autobiographical Memory’, Research Methods for Memory Studies, eds Emily Keightley and Michael Pickering (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 13–14, 17.
[11] The original concept is currently being further developed and tested within the ongoing project Re-Imagining Childhood. Remembered Imagination as a Transdisciplinary Approach to Past Childhoods (REIMAG), funded by The Research Council of Finland, 2025–2029.
[12] See Essi Jouhki and Veera Moll, ‘Education in a Sandbox: Making of an Educational Environment Through Supervised Play in Postwar Helsinki’, History of Education (early online, 2026).
[13] Finnish Literature Society, Archive of Traditional and Contemporary Culture. Memory collection Leikin paikat (2021): 49.