[CRIT 13.1 (2012) 5-11] Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917 doi:10.1558/crit.v13i1.5 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160 © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2012, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheield, S3 8AF. Political Imaginaries in Question Suzi Adams School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia suzi.adams@linders.edu.au Jeremy C. A. Smith School of Education and Arts, University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia jeremy.smith@ballarat.edu.au Ingerid S. Straume University of Oslo Library, University of Oslo, Norway Ingerid.straume@ub.uio.no his special issue of Critical Horizons takes up the problematic of political imaginaries from various angles. In putting political imaginaries into ques- tion, the conditions of possibility for “the political” (le politique) and “poli- tics” (la politique) are interrogated, as well as the concrete, contemporary contexts in which they are embedded, and which they, in turn, transform. In light of the ongoing Global Financial Crisis, the continued ecological devastation of the earth, new sites of terrorism (such as Norway), but also the recent upsurge of protest movements around the world (from the so- called Arab Spring, to the Occupy movement), the questioning of existing horizons of political imaginaries are evident and, consequently, call for elu- cidation. he present special issue begins to articulate a ield of responses to this urgent task. he concept of political imaginaries manifests in the irst instance as a spe- ciic zone within the broader ield of social imaginaries, which, in turn, draws from phenomenological strands of French social and political thought. he ield of social imaginaries forms a particular constellation within the broader “cultural turn” in the human sciences. Charles Taylor gave broad currency to the term “social imaginaries” in Modern Social Imaginaries. 1 In so doing, he leaned on Cornelius Castoriadis’s earlier elucidations of social imaginary 1. C. Taylor, Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).