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This article explores the story of Einar, a Faroese man who always lived within a 500-meters radius on the island of Suðuroy, who never felt “stuck” or “immobile” in the literal sense of the word. Studies have shown that staying is a process, as much as mobility; yet while mobility studies mainly show that imagination is an incentive to move, we argue that imagination may also actively support staying. Combining sociocultural psychology with mobility studies, we propose to explore the entanglement of symbolic mobility (a form of imagination) and various forms of geographical (im)mobility. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and hours of conversation, we present the case study of Einar’s life on his island. We follow the sociogenetic development of the island, and the expansion and contraction of the imaginative horizon over time. On this background, we then retrace the life of Einar and show how, within this transforming context, his imagination developed thanks to resources he could use from the mobility of technologies, ideas, and other people. Interestingly, at different bifurcation points, his symbolic mobility almost led him to move away but, at another point, helped him to refuse geographical mobility. Hence, he was always symbolically mobile while staying. We finally propose directions for generalising from this case study, and implications for cultural psychology and for mobility and migration studies.

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People and societies are guided by what they imagine to lie beyond the present, by what can and should be the case in the future. Yet people do not always agree about the form, content or path to realisation of a given imagined future. As a result, conflicts can arise over something that does not exist yet. In this paper, I propose to integrate theories of social and alternative representations with a sociocultural psychological interpretation of imagination, in order to explore the addressivity of futures and to call for more studies that explicitly take into account the future’s role in the present. I draw on a dialogical case study that was carried out on the Faroe Islands, more precisely on the island of Suðuroy. Whereas the Faroe Islands are experiencing a rapid acceleration in growth, Suðuroy has failed to keep pace and has witnessed decades of emigration and a worsening of its population’s relative socio-economic situation. Islanders liken the current situation to standing at a crossroads, while being unable to agree on which path must be taken in order to reinvigorate a shrinking future. By analysing how one of the two major social representations constructs the other – its alternative representation – I suggest that the absence of transformative dialogue results from incompatible futures. Furthermore, in line with a sociocultural psychological perspective, I also attempt to move beyond the homogenising force inherent in social representation theory by introducing Ingolf and Karin, whose stories illustrate how social and alternative representations are not uniformly shared and enacted, but take different forms in light of unique life experiences.

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