possibility studies

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.

Olivia Oldham • Imagination Infrastructure — What Do We Mean?

Every viewpoint is useful and it takes a wide diversity of views for any group to navigate this universe, let alone to act as custodians for it.

Tyson Yunkaporta • Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World

It is just that easy to open—or to limit—possibility. The approach, the tone, the details matter.

The approach is seeking—not to lock down a particular direct corrective, although those are necessary at times—but instead to include the nth-order—the ecological habit of change that changes change and keeps changing. There is a realm of "possible"

We can imagine almost anything, but only a tiny fraction of what we imagine can become real. There is no easy way to verify how much change is possible. Hard-nosed realists may be right much of the time, but then, periodically, they become dramatically wrong. Wild-eyed visionaries may be wrong much of the time, but occasionally they become

Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination

"“To be aware of . . . the market of competing dreams is quite important, when we think about what kind of a new story . . . we should be able to tell,” says Indra Adnan, of the political platform Alternative UK. Indeed, we must urgently transition from our current provincial, chauvinistic, and hierarchical nightmare to a planetary vision of human

Rutger Brenan says: “You may be dismissed as gullible and naive at first. But remember, what’s naive today may be common sense tomorrow. It’s time for a new realism. It’s time for a new view of humankind.”

I love MAIA’s framing of their work as ‘a rehearsal of the world we want to be’. What exists here today that prefigures the futures we dream of? What if we got better at noticing those glimmers - those fragments of hope that offer some clues about how we might need to reorder our world? What is already here, hiding in the soil, perhaps not seen... See more

Sophia Parker • Emerging Futures at JRF - Two Years In, the Story So Far

Without curiosity, possibility cannot appear on the scene, and without possibility, curiosity has no scene to work with in the first place. The two make one another possible.

Perry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett • Curiosity and Networks of Possibility

I’ve found a strikingly similar pattern among political leaders, academics, NGO workers, businesspeople and young high-fliers, and not just in Europe and North America. Young people that I met in Africa were generally quite optimistic, but here too, despite burgeoning science-fiction scenes, dynamic hubs of digital innovation and lively political