possibility studies

The idea is that it's a system for imagining and executing big projects that actually works. The theory emerges from the intersection of two maxims.

First, there's William Gibson: "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed."

Then, there's William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

Mashing those together, we get

It is possible to alter the course of my becoming.

The science-fiction writer William Gibson suggested that in his lifetime, the future ‘has been a cult, if not a religion’, but that this has waned.4 Future fatigue has set in instead.5 The Brazilian polymath Roberto Unger put the problem starkly: we suffer from a dictatorship of no alternatives.

It’s better to prefer incompleteness over completeness; capacious imagination instead of futures that are too specific or neat; and experimentation and exploration over visions and blueprints. I’m sceptical of overly coherent utopias or the belief that societies follow simple logics. Instead, I see the work of imagination (and the life of real

No matter whether we are talking about realistic or unrealistic possibilities, at the heart of this notion stands a commitment to the idea that the world is not yet finished, that it is in a continuous process of becoming, and that this becoming – for as much as we might anticipate it – is never entirely predictable. Beyond ‘what currently is’,

They also follow a narrative structure in which choices and opportunities are rendered intelligible by placing them within wider stories of who we are and who we are becoming.

Pedagogies of the possible are an educational necessity . Traditional forms of education, focused on standardised goals, uniformity in teaching, and sameness of outcomes, are increasingly recognised as not suitable for the challenges (and impossibilities) of today. Living within uncertain, complex and difficult environments, defined by a fast pace

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

“experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads” (p. 12). Those silken lines are threaded and rethreaded, knotted and reknotted, to make and remake webs of sense.