possibility studies
In order for the oppressed to be able to wage the struggle for their liberation, they must perceive the reality of oppression not as a closed world from which there is no exit, but as a limiting situation which they can transform. —Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed1
Kelly Hayes • Let This Radicalize You
Beyond immediate sensory information, we create our perceptions of the social and physical world using a range of highly personal sources collected across our lifetimes.
T. L. Uglow • A Curiosity of Doubts: Penguin Special
(5) But the Real is much more than this “reality”! The real refers to the endlessly changing stream of life, “the unbroken wholeness,” to use Physicist David Bohm’s wonderful expression, out of which everything comes, including the Planet we all share. As the Manifesto puts it, the real is characterized by radical open-endedness and becoming. In
... See moreArturo Escobar • Welcome to Possibility Studies
There are many incredible individuals, communities, and organisations dedicated to cultivating this fertile soil, nurturing the infrastructure of possibility across the many levels of society (though some may not recognise themselves or their work as such, nor use the language of the ‘imagination’ or ‘futures’). While this work sits largely on the... See more
Will Bull • Building the Infrastructure of Possibility
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.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
If we lose faith in the future, we are likely to do less to make a better future happen. In this way, fatalism can, indeed, become fate.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
“Hope is the embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists”—Rebecca Solnit *“Any useful idea about the future should appear ridiculous”–Jim Dator*
Loes Damhof • Imagining the Impossible: An Act of Radical Hope
The infrastructure of possibility—the spaces, conditions, practices, rituals, and language (and the networks of practitioners, communities, and organisations that nurture it)—destabilises conventional ways of seeing and knowing the world, and invites us to experience the fullness of reality, beyond the colonial constraints of modernity and its... See more
Will Bull • Building the Infrastructure of Possibility
In the process of construction and deconstruction, knowledge develops in immediately contiguous spaces—that is, along the adjacent possible edges, both inside and outside of a knowledge network structure. To think curiously, then, is to inaugurate that organic process of actualizing adjacent epistemic possibilities.