Travel and imagination : an invitation

There is always a risk when we venture onto new theoretical terrain that we will forget some of the important things we learnt elsewhere. In our calls for a retheorization of the imagination together with travel, then, we want to be explicit with our intentions to bring with us that critical work we have already commenced upon elsewhere that parries with issues of power, ideology, politics and social justice. Those narratives of inequality that we see and deal with in everyday lives can follow us into our imaginative travels, too; those divisions and asymmetries that align and spring from identities defined around gender, sex, religion, age, health, class and ethnicity. It can be, when all said and done, as decidedly undemocratic as anywhere else, as fragile and dissonant. Our invitation to travel and imagination is, then, a cautiously optimistic one.