ABSTRACT
In 1959 Wright Mills argued the case for sociology as an imaginative pursuit which necessarily retained a certain playfulness (Mills, 1959). In this book I intend to scope some of the possibilities for a Vygotskian research imagination. In so doing I will try to avoid the sense of singularity that Mills imposed with his title The Sociological Imagination (Morgan, 1998). My argument is that Vygotsky and his followers provide a rich and vivid palette of theoretical and methodological ideas which can be utilised as we struggle to understand the processes through which the human mind is formed. He argued that creativity is a social process which requires appropriate tools, artefacts and cultures in which to thrive (Vygotsky, 2004). A central argument of this book is that Vygotsky and those who have been influenced by him provide us with tools and artefacts which can be deployed in creative social science. These are the tools and artefacts for imagining ways of researching and ways of thinking about the objects of our research.
