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The spatial logic of epistemic imaginaries: Guided by Édouard Glissant
Book chapter

The spatial logic of epistemic imaginaries: Guided by Édouard Glissant

Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, Maggie MacLure, David Rousell, Laura Trafí-Prats and Sarah E. Truman
Posthuman Social Science and Computational Culture: Essays on Methodology, Theory and Practice, pp.194-211
Routledge, 1st
2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003538769-13
Appears in  Recent Faculty of Education Publications

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Abstract

The term “epistemic imaginary” underscores the power of the imagination in sparking insight, shaping knowledge practices, and establishing epistemic authority. The imagination is the milieu within which reason habituates itself, fabricating hypotheses and anticipating empirical encounters. This complex polemic between the imagination and empirical “correction” gradually sustains habits of trust and epistemic certainty. An epistemic imaginary is thus a set of knowledge claims performed passionately as a truth warranting, a set of declarations that establishes positionality and situates perspective, perhaps substantiated by other thinkers in some degree, and often enshrined and then imposed on others beyond the initial pertinent boundaries. An epistemic imaginary is always made manifest in a manifold of contested assertions, delusions, and speculative ventures, almost always situated in spatial politics. Knowledge and truth-telling are habits born of the imagination in place.

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