possibility studies
Collectively, these four forms of the possible (i.e. new node, new edge, changed node, changed edge) in network science are studied under the notion of the adjacent possible (Björneborn, 2020). The term “adjacent possible” refers to the fact that what is possible is what is adjacent to what exists. What is impossible is what is not adjacent to what
... See morePerry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett • Curiosity and Networks of Possibility
Imagination is like thin air, cloud-like. Imagination only truly influences the world when it ceases to be imagination and mutates into repetitions, habits and cycles, becoming embedded in the rhythms of daily life, a part of people’s jobs and routines. Societies are best understood as patterns of regularity of this kind—what Pierre Bourdieu
... See moreGeoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
Children in our studies who believe in possibility rarely cite libertarian ideas of “free will” (I am the ultimate authority over my actions and decisions). Instead, they sound like they are imagining hypothetical (and novel) solutions to social and psychological problems. This increasing willingness to transcend psychological, social, and moral
... See moreTamar Kushnir • How Children Learn to Transcend Limits: Developmental Pathways to Possibility Beliefs
By foregrounding hope, imagination, agency and creativity, we can get to fully appreciate what it means to be human in a world that oftentimes resists our needs, expectations, and aspirations.
Vlad P. Glăveanu • Possibility Studies: A Manifesto
That we are more at home among familiar ideas is very apparent, though these ideas are so normalised that we often fail to see them as products of human imagination at all. Much of daily life depends on our ability to believe in things that are, essentially, fictions.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
In order to see more diverse possibilities in the world around us, one needs to widen the lens of perception, and imagining multiple futures attribute to that. When we imagine more, when we explore multiple futures, we perceive more in the present.
Loes Damhof • Imagining the Impossible: An Act of Radical Hope
Most germane for our purposes, knowledge, too, can be analyzed as a network. In this case, nodes can be pieces of information, or experiences, or words, or knowers themselves, while the edges can be the relationships between those pieces of information, those experiences, words, or knowers.
Perry Zurn, Dani S. Bassett • Curiosity and Networks of Possibility
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
... See moreArturo Escobar • Welcome to Possibility Studies
(6) This worldview of a single reality and a single world is profoundly defuturing, to invoke Australian design theorist Fry’s (1999) concept. To recover the ability to imagine other possible futures requires going beyond the modernist ontology of separation and toward an ontology that acknowledges the interdependence of everything that exists.
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