Imaginactivism is—perhaps self-evidently—a compound word made up of Imagine and Activism, but intended to connote the process relationship between imagining and acting to make change in the world. The coinage is intended to signal a positive and effective relationship between creating and sharing visions of a better world that is possible and being moved by those visions to take practical action. It also suggests that we value imagining and imagination as an active process of crafting a vision that is a necessary precursor to worldly action, and sharing it with and in a community of ideas. The temporality of that relationship might work differently; our shared visions might emerge from the actions we take, or they might co-emerge or be co-created, but the important point is that we don’t regard the practice of imagining as simply escape or retreat from the world.
Joan Haran (2017): Instantiating Imaginactivism: Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as Inspiration. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No. 12. https://doi.org/10.13016/M2GT5FH08