The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
‘Imagination is not a luxury,’ she says (five words we should emblazon on T-shirts). ‘We should not only be thinking about building cities for the human body, but also for the human imagination.… The more we distribute the capacity to imagine different futures, the better off we will be.’
Rob Hopkins • From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s
... See moreadrienne maree brown • Emergent Strategy
Practical imagination, then, is not a luxury. It is a cultural and political practice. It refuses the idea that the future is something to be predicted or owned. Instead, it understands the future as something to be imagined with others, through contradiction and against the assumptions of the present. This requires transforming how imagination is ... See more
Practical imagination
At the same time, imagination must be decolonized. The dominant modes of imagining the future—technocratic, extractivist, growth-driven—are not universal. They are specific to white, masculine, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) subjectivities trained to equate imagination not only with control, scale and optimization, but ... See more