‘I Can’t Imagine’: Speculative Emotions and the Sociological Imagination

Abstract This essay explores the relation between emotion and imagination in sociology. While scholars have noted that imagination is under-theorised as a sociological concept, attention to sociological texts, most closely C. Wright Mill’s The Sociological Imagination , reveals the interplay of feeling and imagining across personal and social scales. I draw from Mills to explore the role of emotional speculation in qualitative survey data about experiences of family estrangement. In the survey responses, people articulated the limits of what they and others could imagine about familial relationships. This paper therefore identifies a lens to pursue further analyses of the imaginative capacities of emotion in intimate life.