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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

(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.