possibility studies

Countries that used to define themselves through creating bold new institutions no longer do so—there are no recent equivalents to the NHS or the BBC in Britain; no equivalents of NASA or DARPA in the US. In much of academic life, too, you are more likely to succeed by slightly tweaking an established idea than creating a novel one.18

exploring alternate realities reveals the interlocking contingencies of the status quo, speculative stories may prove useful not just to those imagining the future, but those who seek to invent it.

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.

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.

Our assumptions of the future are being challenged: even what we took for granted now seems uncertain. And instead of asking: how did we get here? We are left with the question: what made us think we would never get here? If the unimaginable suddenly becomes a reality, then what is left to imagine? Is it still worth being hopeful? It appears that

Collectively, we also need pictures of societal futures that go beyond today’s status quo. They complement but do not replace the necessary work of activism that fights against the injustices of the present. We also need new answers to new problems—the vulnerabilities caused by a more connected world, or by potentially lethal artificial

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

Language is a blueprint for culture. We put ourselves into our words, from grocery lists to theorems. Needs are certainly encoded into language, but beyond those needs we see that imagination itself is just as much encoded into language, and different cultures have different languages. How is this possible? It suggests that imagination is dynamic,