MANIFESTO FOR IMAGINING OTHERWISE
What follows is a manifesto for how to imagine otherwise, with care, and with the aim of imagining our way towards an ecologically just, intersectionally aware, future.
- Use already existing tools like the Intersectional Environmentalist pledge https://www.intersectionalenvironmentalist.com/ (founded by Leah Thomas)
- Make sure all intersectional beliefs are visible and verbalised from the very start, to create an inclusive environment – see
- When imagining alternative futures, base it in inclusive research – most of the transformative actions for liveable futures are already happening out there, somewhere.
- Create a common working culture that you refer to each day – & update as you go
- Remember the act of imagining can feel like an unaffordable privilege: and as the times become more troubled, the space of imagining becomes ever more circumscribed.
- Remember also that to shut down the imagination is to rob people of their relationship to the future – imagining is as essential as breathing, and to treat it is such is an act of resistance against dominant cultures that would ringfence the imagination as a luxury
- Ensure that no one has to carry the weight of their identity alone: the labour of imagining multiplicity in the future must be distributed and shared, to work against silos, and a ‘divide and rule’ mentality
- Take time: the product is the outcome of the process; it matters how the process is set up, and in times of scarcity, imagining abundance and care can seem impossible – yet to imagine a future of care, attention and affordance asks that we treat the ‘what if’, ‘as though’ we could already enact it (Bojana Kunst 2018).
- Continuously and consciously name the underlying ethos of the work, in the room and the process: go slow, listen, reframe and reform as the process evolves.
- Remember when times are troubled, that imagining becomes a political act of resistance against accepting the status quo as inevitable.
