The imaginarium of self‐care: Speculative futures of hope for student mental health

Abstract

AbstractRecent ethnographies have investigated self‐care as a socially driven configuration of care. This analysis engages theorizing on the imagination to expose new social dimensions of self‐care in cases of mental health as embodied and communal. Based on fieldwork across Canadian universities and in conversation with students, campus wellness providers, and a group of psychiatric epidemiologists seeking to understand the mental health treatment choices of students, this article examines how these different subjects activate what I call an imaginarium of self‐care. Among young adults in Canada, mounting social ills that go therapeutically unaccounted for have relocated forms of self‐care into the imagination through play and world‐building in ways that challenge the distinction between material and speculative healing. Attending to the imaginative dimensions of self‐care makes coherent the ways that young people are grasping for hope in a world that—when embodied—resists recovery.