Send message to Authors

Short abstract

While positive visions often obscure future loss, imagined endings can bring such loss to the fore. We explore the notion of imagined endings as example of alternative futures.

Long abstract

Sustainability transitions research increasingly examines how futures are imagined and how these visions motivate (governance) interventions in the present. However, this emphasis on the future privileges emergence over disappearance. Socio-technical change always induces winners and losers. Despite promises of jobs, economic growth, and more efficient and effective ways of doing things that bolster visions of new technologies, novelty has dark sides in its negative effects on livelihoods, communities, and sustainability. Yet these too often remain invisible or are deemed regrettable but necessary. However, when imagined futures are explicit about the specific industries, livelihoods, or landscapes destined to end—through phase-outs, closures, and terminations—the anticipated loss is brought to the fore. Endings-oriented visions are so qualitatively different from those guiding the emergence of novelty that such imagined endings could be considered “alternative futures” par excellence. We explore the concept of imagined endings to capture this underappreciated dimension of imagined futures. Imagined endings encompass how actors envision what they stand to lose through planned interventions and wider transitions, and how these contested expectations have political consequences long before, or even independently of, material changes. However, imagined endings need not be inherently negative but can also have powerful emancipatory functions. In this contribution we unpack the notion of imagined endings and explore their roles in processes of transformative change. We draw on sociological theories of loss (e.g. Reckwitz, 2024) by shifting attention from loss as an experienced condition to loss as a future-oriented concept, as anticipation that structures present action.