About Us

Who are we?

CIRCE is an international research centre affiliated with the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, Canada.

We are interested in imagination in all its varied forms. Our deepest roots are in education, and many of us work directly with educators, schools and other site of learning and teaching. At the same time, we recognize the countless ways in which imagination is entwined with the world – not only human culture and societies, but the life of the Earth itself.

Our approach to imagination is grounded in curiosity and humility. We take it for granted that imagination exceeds our attempts to understand and to harness it for particular ends. We also believe that imagination is of vital importance to all efforts to cultivate human and more-than-human flourishing. Our central purpose is to share ways of nourishing and developing this extraordinary capacity in the service of more just, ecologically sane, and existentially healthy communities and organizations.

This part of our website shares some of the stories of how CIRCE came to be what it is today. One set of pages describes a series of research projects and initiatives that shaped our current understandings of imagination and imaginative education. Another set of pages introduces a range of people associated with CIRCE through its history up until the present.

From the beginning, CIRCE has been inspired by a vision of the radical transformation of education. Initially, this commitment was shaped by Kieran Egan’s theory of educational development and his suggestions for making imagination and storytelling central to children’s engagment with the school curriculum. Over time, this vision has expanded in response to our understandings of the ever-deepening crisis of modern (colonial, capitalist, patriarchal…) civilization. We hope that you will find stories here that resonate with your own, and ideas and practices that you can adopt and adapt to the needs of your own context. We would love to hear from you about the kinds of transformation, from the small to the vast, that you are engaged with, and how they intersect with CIRCE’s endeavours. These are challenges that call on all of us to imagine and work together.

History, Structure and People

CIRCE grew out of the Imaginative Education Research Group (IERG), which Kieran Egan and colleagues in the SFU Faculty of Education founded in 2001.

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Projects and Initiatives

Every one of these projects has its own story, and we cannot fully do justice to any of them here. However, we have provided an outline of each one and indicated readings or other sources where you can find out more.

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