on agency & what it gives us
Worldbuilding, for me, was a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being alive.
Morgan Harper Nichols • A Necessary Imagination
the most important thing you can do to transform the world is to act. Taking action is a practice of hope. Experience and meaning are derived from doing.
Kelly Hayes • Let This Radicalize You
Positive Friction encourages an alternative design practice in order to restore human agency within online spaces
DVTK • Positive Friction
Meanwhile, the majority of “normals” (to borrow a term from the sci-fi film Gattaca) are expected to take orders, complete tasks, stand in line, clock in and out . . . punctually, obediently, subserviently. No dancing in the halls, and certainly no daydreaming about a world put together differently.
Ruha Benjamin • Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
Often, hope works best alongside tools for proactively tackling future challenges. If our work becomes a catalysing force for people to imagine things they would not have been able to imagine otherwise and act upon that imagination, then that’s powerful, and for me, this is a slow form of critical activism.
Anab Jain • Calling for a More-Than-Human Politics
When you apply possibility thinkingin your daily life, it can give you a powerful sense of agency. It can help you find innovative solutions to actually do what you want to do, in one form or another.
Constance de Saint Laurent • How to use ‘possibility thinking’ | Psyche Guides
Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you.
Simon Sarris • The Most Precious Resource Is Agency
“That feeling of helplessness comes out of the fact that all our agency is being channeled through these media,” he said. “We have these events that are ponderously large, like climate change or gun control, and to view them only through the lens of what happened or the abstraction of what people are saying strips away the notion of our agency and... See more
Charlie Warzel • How The Internet Is Like A Dying Star
Affective Foresight begins with the acknowledgement that futures thinking benefits the human emotional state, seeks to understand emotional nuance of the future, and promotes the benefits of foresight as a tool for improved mental health and decision making