possibility studies

Understanding the development of possibility beliefs can help us better understand how we come to believe it is possible to do something we have never experienced before. Where do new ideas about possibility come from? Why do we think it is possible to learn a new skill, pursue a career change, push the limits of performance in sports, write the

Given the inherent emergence of futures — both imaginary and realised — imagination infrastructures need to be understood as verbs, not nouns, actions, not things — processes of creation in a constant process of becoming.

Art, as Bloch said, is a laboratory of possibilities. Indeed, other worlds become possible as and insofar as we curiously reformulate the networks in our heads—and in our hearts.

we need a sustained ethical reflection on the scope, nature, and limits of our engagement with the possible and the consequences this engagement has for ourselves, for others, for society, and for the planet. Being in the position to envision a course of action and its alternatives and to evaluate which possibilities should be acted upon and which

possibility beliefs , for the purposes of this paper, are simply beliefs about our actions and their limits; they help us enumerate options and carve out pathways for action.

It takes a deeply personal, in the bone, in the blood, in the spine recognition of the variables in motion. An abstracted version, an impersonal version, or seemingly "objective" or professional version will pop into modeling and mapping, and lose the necessary tangibility of the details – thus losing access to the realms of possibility to meet

the world’s most visible public intellectuals today more often revive or reassert old ideas, rather than generating new ones. The result is that old zombie orthodoxies survive far longer than they should.

My argument is that to reimagine what’s possible is one of the most complex cultural and political acts one can engage in at present, whether we are in the academy, activism, or policy making. This is because one of the most pernicious effects of today’s dominant political, economic, and belief systems has been to narrow down, if not colonize, the

Of course, possibility beliefs can, and often do, derive from abstract self-beliefs as we get older. But also, simple beliefs about possible actions and their limits might precede, and contribute to, the construction of our self-efficacy, our mindsets, and our identities over time.