Reimagining Academic Freedom: An Introduction

Is there a need to reimagine academic freedom? Does it happen? Where and how? As guest editors of this special issue, we have enjoyed the challenge of curating a set of papers under the theme of ‘reimagining academic freedom’. By ‘reimagining’ we refer to an act of imagining again and anew, more precisely to develop new conceptualisations and codifications of academic freedom (AF) from different perspectives. Because academic freedom is a necessary precondition to sociological imagination that challenges and defies the status quo, we also employ the concept of ‘social imaginary’ as a framework for understanding academic freedom and its multiple facets. Here ‘social imaginary’ refers broadly to the organising structure of shared understanding of academic freedom that makes legible or illegible certain relationships and practices within a given community. Social imaginaries can also organise social relations on different scales (e.g. national, regional, global), circumscribe the questions deemed worth asking and delimit the answers considered viable or valid, they, thus, link present conditions to future aspirations. As the authors in this issue argue, imaginaries also remount to all that has not been, to the unexpressed potentialities, to the reservoirs of the future – in term of the virtuality of action – that the past holds in its folds (see Pinto & Zellini, this issue).