A post by Amy Kind
Way back in 2016, Eric Peterson came to me with an unexpected idea: What if we started a blog on imagination? I was intrigued, but also hesitant. Could we really make it work? And how, exactly, would it work? But I started reaching out to some imagination folks, and I got a lot of positive feedback… so we started moving forward with the planning.
And then, on April 3, 2017, The Junkyard published its first post. As I wrote at the time, the blog’s name was inspired by a comment made by Noel Carroll at the 2015 meeting of the Pacific Division APA. In his words, imagination is “the junkyard of the mind” – a place where everything gets thrown in. Amidst the imaginative scrap heap we find such varied things as fiction, pretense, modal epistemology, mindreading, empathy, thought experiments, creativity, delusions, dreams, metaphors, and much more. As I noted, “this same junkyard is also littered with attempts to understand the nature of imagination,” and while there might be some points of agreement about what imagination is, there are surprisingly many issues where no clear consensus has yet emerged. But my post – and the decision to start this blog – was underlain by a message of hope:
It would be a mistake to consign imagination to the scrap heap, or to write it off as unsalvageable, and in fact, recent explorations into imagination have proved to be both rich and fruitful. The success of this recent research suggests that we could benefit considerably from continued investigation into imagination and, in particular, from the kind of exploratory, collaborative, and quick-moving kind of investigation that can flourish online. We know that the blogosphere is already crowded … But given the increasing number of philosophers and academics in cognate fields to whom the imagination is of interest, we’ve decided that the time is ripe for Team Imagination to carve out space for a blog of our own.
We started slowly, with posts running every other week, but we soon were able to switch to a weekly posting schedule. When we reached our one-year anniversary, I was amazed at how much we had already accomplished, and then we hit two, and then three … At our five-year anniversary, I wrote a post celebrating some of our achievements but I haven’t done any real accounting on the blog of what has happened since then – and it’s been a lot! To give just two key statistics, I can report that since the blog’s inception, we have had 152K unique visitors and over 294K pageviews.
We didn’t mark the occasion when we turned nine a couple of months ago in April 2026, but I was already doing some preliminary thinking about how we could celebrate our tenth anniversary next year. And the more I thought about it, the more convinced I was that this milestone deserves to be marked. It deserves to be celebrated. And what better way to celebrate than with a party!
OK, maybe not quite a party. But a conference. A big conference. A big philosophy of imagination conference the likes of which have never been seen before! And thus, I am now very pleased to announce the Junkyard Anniversary Meeting (JAM), to be held April 2-4, 2027 at Claremont McKenna College in southern California. There is a terrific lineup of invited speakers:
Hannah H. Kim, University of Arizona
Peter Kung, Arizona State University
Julia Langkau, University of Geneva
Peter Langland-Hassan, University of Cincinnati
Daniel Munro, Boston University
Josh Myers. Western University
E. Hande Tuna, UC-Santa Cruz
Neil Van Leeuwen, Florida State University
We will also have a book symposium on Empathic Reason: Imagination, Morality, and the Minds of Others by Luke Roelofs, with commentaries from Heidi Maibom, Aarhus University; Colin Marshall, University of Washington; and Eric Peterson, Dolan School of Business, Fairfield University.
But wait, there’s more! I am pleased to be opening a call for submitted papers, and we hope to be joined by a whole bunch of imagination folks who will present their work in parallel sessions. A limited number of partial travel stipends will be available to early career researchers and researchers travelling from outside of North America. I am also opening up a call for proposals for symposia of three papers grouped together by common theme. If you are interested in playing some other role in the conference – as session chair or as a commentator – don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly.
Philosophical papers and symposia on all topics concerning imagination are welcome, with a submission deadline of October 15. Full details on the CFP are here. Of course, anyone interested in philosophy of imagination is most welcome to attend even without presenting a paper. Registration details will be made available closer to the time of the event. I am really hoping that this conference will prove to be an important event for the philosophy of imagination community. Who knows what ideas for future research the talks will spark? And I envision lots of opportunities for us to chat, build community, and lay the groundwork for future collaborations, large and small. So please come JAM with us!
With this post, The Junkyard closes out our AY 2025-26 year – but we will be back in late August with another series of great posts, and I’ll report on further details about JAM once I have them. Have a wonderfully productive and imaginative summer!
p.s. Is this the first of more JAMs to come? That’s not my current plan. But the last time I thought I was organizing a one-off conference, I ended up with a five-year series. In any case, whatever happens with JAM, I can promise that I’m committed to steering The Junkyard into its second decade. I can’t promise that I will still be at its helm when it hits its 20th anniversary, but I’m not ready to hang up the towel quite yet.