Re-Imagining Childhood. Imagination as a Transdisciplinary Approach to Exploring Past Childhoods (REIMAG)
Table of contents
Project description
The history of childhood has emerged as one of the most dynamic fields in recent historical research, expanding our understanding of childhood as a meaningful and complex life stage. Yet, capturing the ‘authentic’ lived experiences of children from the past remains a persistent challenge. REIMAG offers a significant methodological contribution to this field by proposing that the world of past children can be accessed by shifting the dominant research approach away from the physical, empirically verifiable reality and ambitiously exploring the possibilities of children’s mental and imaginary worlds.
This project explores autobiographical memories of childhood and play to access the lived reality of children. The starting point for the study is the idea that children's lived experience is constructed at the intersection of everyday reality and imagination. Through play, children interpret and process everything they encounter, see, and hear in their everyday lives. Consequently, REIMAG asks: How are the imaginary worlds of childhood remembered, and what do they reveal about the social and cultural interactions of children in the past?
Combining historical perspectives with approaches from developmental psychology, education, and philosophy, REIMAG adopts a transdisciplinary approach to the history of childhood. Drawing on cultural-historical theory as conceptualised by Lev Vygotsky, the project seeks to historicise and conceptualise “imagination” to understand how it reflects children’s understanding of their environment, society, and culture. In other words, the focus is not on what imagination is, but rather on what it does and how it resonates across autobiographical contexts.
To this end, REIMAG introduces the concept of remembered imagination – a methodological tool for accessing and interpreting children’s lived, multisensory experiences. This approach acknowledges the liminal space between the external material world and the internal imaginary world, proposing that children’s ‘authentic’ lived experience resides at this intersection.
In sum, this project aims:
- To study the empirical history of children’s play and imagination.
- To develop a new theoretical model that positions imagination as a key analytical lens for understanding children’s lived experiences.
- To renew scholarly discussion on the history of the mind by highlighting the potential of mental imagery in accessing lived childhoods
