possibility studies

As stated by Glăveanu (2022) in his Manifesto, “[t]he possible re-emerges as an organizing category in our lives and our thinking not despite but because of living through the seemingly impossible and unimaginable.” The possible, transitions, temporalities, and the pluriverse appear as part of the same complex process of civilizational transition.

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,

As a condition of innovation, Johnson (2010) argues, “the adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself” (p. 31)

As these stories ripple out through the culture, the imaginary futures they portray influence the world we build for ourselves

Even when possibilities are imagined by single individuals, awareness of what is possible and its enactment take place within the evolving interdependence between person and context.

What if imagining and even engaging with the impossible has actually become a necessity? In the current landscape of geopolitical events, climate change, and other accumulating societal challenges, it seems that we are stuck in our inability to perceive and respond to emergence. The call for urgency, the awareness that technology is changing expone

On balance, we should always choose hope over fear. We may be wrong, but at least hope is productive (and there are worse things in life than disappointment).

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.

new roles for museums and galleries, suggesting how they could showcase alternative futures just as they tell us about our past.