Short Abstract:

Exploring speculative futuring and prefiguration as a pathway towards sustainability transformations, seeking to transcend control-oriented, colonial modernity imaginaries towards ethics of care-based imaginaries.

Long Abstract:

Speculating and practising pluriversal, post-development futures offers pathways towards critical sustainability. Speculations inspired by relationality, feminist ecology and decolonial theory, mean not only thinking about futures, but learning what new worlds can be through practical prefiguration. Achieving radical possibilities means moving beyond anthropocentric perspectives, and amplifying 'other-than-human' and 'less-than-human' representation. This panel seeks to explore pluriversal living and dreaming, recognizing that some communities have long lived in sustainable ways, but are threatened by extractivism and appropriations, and that creativity is also necessary to create new imaginaries where contemporary conditions in many contexts around the world that are characterised by intense and intensifying colonial modernities (Quijano, Arora and Stirling, 2023; Nelson et al, 2024). Speculative futuring is not solely a cognitive practice, but an affective and embodied one and can involve unusual collective collaborations to generate a kaleidoscope of future possibilities (Nelson et al, 2024). Deconstructing ingrained certainties means challenging sources of authority and vested interests and is thus extremely difficult. Creating space for ‘many worlds in this world’ (Escobar, 2022) is central to pluriversal politics, but transformative spaces are being closed all the time. The panel seeks contributions - from humanities, social sciences, arts, and activists - that explore these darkening, control-oriented actualities and futures, and may generate avenues for hope through speculative futures creativities, affective engagements and ethics of care mobilisations.

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