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Cultivating collective imagination beyond crisis
Rose Cairns
Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex, Jubilee Building, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9RH, United Kingdom
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Collective imagination
Imaginaries
Crisis
Metacrisis
Spiritual ecology
Transformations to sustainability
ABSTRACT
What might be required for us to inhabit a present dened by crises and collectively imagine a hopeful future?
This paper explores some of the ways in which the dominance of crisis framings in contemporary life might shape
our ability to ‘imagine together’, and identies a burgeoning body of work aligned with the concerns of spiritual
ecology, that endeavours to cultivate the eld of our collective imagination as an act of deep meaning-making. I
identify a set of interlinked themes or qualities that resonate throughout and animate this work, and argue that
these may gesture towards ways of cultivating spaces rich with imaginative potential to enable us collectively to
imagine ‘beyond crisis’. These include a recognition of the ways in which Western scientic modernity continues
to shape spaces of imaginative possibility; a resurgence of contemporary animism and a ‘re-membering’ of
humans in broader kinship with the animate earth; challenges to temporalities of crisis; the honouring of
emotions such as joy, hope, and grief; and the reconnection with somatic wisdom and ritual.
1. Imaginaries of crisis
Public discourse abounds with the catastrophic language of extinc-
tion, collapse and suffering, leading some to refer to the current his-
torical moment as the ‘Age of Angst’ (Shfak, 2024). Multiple areas of life
are now understood to be ‘in crisis’ (from climate to economies,
healthcare systems to biodiversity), and the interlinked and insoluble
nature of these crises has given rise to the terms polycrisis and perma-
crisis (Brown et al., 2023). Some have referred to a sense of a ‘shrinking
future’ (Mulgan, 2020) as we collectively struggle to imagine beyond the
crisis-dened present. Simultaneously there has been a growing recog-
nition of the importance of the collective imagination to debates around
sustainable futures. Collective imagination is variously discussed in
sustainability literatures as an ‘essential capacity,’ (Moore and Milkor-
eit, 2020) a crucial but ‘scarce resource’ (Galafassi, 2018), or a site of
‘future making’ (Jasanoff, 2020), and is widely acknowledged as being
of vital importance in enabling individuals and societies to navigate
uncertainties and turbulence and ‘in a world of continual change’
(Brown and Harris, 2010). The argument that our collective imagination
is failing us (Milkoreit, 2017), just when we need it most, has amplied
calls to catalyse processes of collective imagining for sustainability
(Burkett et al., 2023).
This paper will examine the relationship between narratives of crisis
and the collective imagination. It will explore the ways in which crisis
framings may shape spaces for imagination, reviewing work that illus-
trates how crisis narratives may be inimical to spaces of imaginative
potential, often reinforcing regressive/controlling politics and fostering
fear and panic or paralysis. If a crisis framing is to be generative, it may
be necessary to recognise that the fundamental ‘crisis’ we face is a ‘crisis
of meaning’ (Rowson, 2023). As Zak Stein puts it, ‘despite all the con-
crete problems faced by society, the most pressing problems are actually
‘in our heads’ (i.e., in our minds and souls, we are in a crisis of the psy-
che)’ (Stein, 2022). If this is so, then processes of collective imagination
have an important role not (solely) as sites of envisioning or anticipating
futures, or as spaces of innovation, but as potential sites of profound
meaning-making. The paper will examine some of the diverse actors
working in this space, broadly aligned with ‘spiritual ecology’ (Tucker,
2024), in what might be called ‘soul- centric’ processes of collective
imagination. An exploration of this work and the ideas and practices that
animate it, point to some starting points for addressing our ‘crisis of
meaning’ and gesture toward ways in which we might collectively
imagine ‘beyond crisis’.
2. Imagining imagination
One of the ways in which the collective imagination has been
explored within the academic sustainability literature, is through the
lens of social imaginaries (Adams and Smith, 2019). In the simple
denition provided by Taylor the term social imaginaries refers to the
ways in which people collectively imagine their social existence, ‘how
they t together with others, how things go on between them and their
fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper
E-mail address: R.cairns@sussex.ac.uk.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Environmental Science and Policy
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/envsci
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2025.104074
Received 28 November 2024; Accepted 17 April 2025
Environmental Science and Policy 169 (2025) 104074
Available online 5 May 2025
1462-9011/© 2025 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
nc-nd/4.0/ ).
normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (Taylor,
2004). Others have dened imaginaries as ‘an organized eld of social
practices… and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (in-
dividuals) and globally dened elds of possibility’ (Appadurai, 1996).
The extensive scholarship on imaginaries has described the ways in
which the ‘conjuring’ (Bhan, 2014) and circulation (Valaskivi and
Sumiala, 2014) of imaginaries inuence governance, illuminating ‘how
systems come to be legitimized and what comes to be perceived as
possible’ (Dencik, 2018). Imaginaries are thus recognised to play a
crucial role in enabling and constraining possibilities for transformative
change, and the concept has been widely used in the broad elds of
research related to ‘transformations to sustainability’ (Moore and Mil-
koreit, 2020; Galafassi, 2018; Bina et al., 2020; Scoones et al., 2020;
Mehta et al., 2021). Much of this literature emphasizes imaginaries as an
important eld of political action, or a powerful political resource, and
has drawn attention to ways in which marginalised or more vulnerable
groups are structurally restricted in their ability to wield imaginative
power (Vervoort, 2022). In this vein, it has been argued that ‘demanding
the right forms of participation to shape… imaginaries, is essential for
‘reclaiming for this century’s citizens an authentic politics of the future.’
(Jasanoff, 2020) Decolonial scholars in particular have drawn attention
to imaginaries as the site of ongoing struggle (Maldonado-Torres, 2007;
Mignolo, 2007) and highlight the huge ‘symbolic violence’ inscribed and
represented within the imaginaries of colonised peoples (Sarr, 2019),
through the erasure of local histories, languages, and practices, and the
disruption and subjugation of indigenous ways of knowing and being.
Thus the collective imagination is sometimes framed as a ‘battleground’
in decolonial struggles. As adrienne maree brown puts it: ‘[o]ur radical
imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to
shape our lived reality’ (Brown, 2019)
Proliferating narratives of crisis can also be understood as social
imaginaries, and the question of how these imaginaries shape different
aspects of social and political life, and indeed whether ‘crisis’ might be
limiting ways of thinking (Akomolafe, 2018), warrants critical scrutiny.
The governance implications of declarations of crisis have been exten-
sively studied, in particular the ways in which the language of crisis
often tends to become associated with singular ‘no alternative’ policy
prescriptions. The neoliberal mantra of “there is no alternative” (TINA),
popularized by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s in the UK, is a prime
example of the use of a crisis framing to limit imaginative possibilities
and entrench the status-quo. Feminist scholarship has argued that ‘we all
too readily fall into the trap of thinking that nuanced political and legal
thinking must be sacriced at times of crisis’ (Otto, 2011), and has
critiqued the ways in which feminism may be ‘pushed ‘off the map’ in a
crisis’ (Otto, 2011). Similarly, decolonial literatures have drawn atten-
tion to the question of what an invocation of ‘crisis’ (and the attendant
implied imagined possibility of a ‘return to normal’) implies for struc-
tural inequalities and efforts to transform this ‘normal’. Whyte argues
moreover, that coloniality is fundamentally bolstered by crisis narratives.
He describes the ways in which those who perpetrate colonialism often
‘imagine that their wrongful actions are defensible because they are
responding to some crisis’ (Whyte, 2020), and points to the contempo-
rary colonial logics of certain responses to environmental crises, climate
change in particular.
There are many examples of the ways in which declarations of crisis
engender technocratic or anti-democratic forms of governance, justi-
fying ‘states of exception’ that can threaten constitutional rights and
suspend normal politics. Within the sustainability discourse, this has at
times even been made explicit, for example, the inuential Earth sci-
entist James Lovelock’s argument that democracy should be ‘put on
hold’ in the face of the environmental crisis (Lovelock, 2010). In the
context of climate change, Hulme has drawn attention to the social and
political dangers of the framing climate change in terms of a ‘climate
emergency’ (Hulme, 2019; McHugh et al., 2021; Sillmann et al., 2015).
Others have demonstrated how crisis narratives can facilitate the
emergence of certain forms of (often control-centred) governance and
corporatized development, for example Shuilenburg and Pali who argue
that a ‘culture of crisis’ is intrinsic to the ourishing of imaginaries of
‘smartness as the solution’ (whether this be smart cities, smart meters
etc) tacitly prioritising particular imaginaries of (smart/technological)
futures, and obscuring others (Shuilenburg and Pali, 2021). Even leaving
aside the many political risks associated with declarations of crisis
outlined above, other literatures on decision-making in ‘crisis mode’
have pointed out that this kind of decision making is generally not ‘good’
decision making: there is the real risk that crisis is not averted, but
simply shifted: e.g. climate change risks replaced by geoengineering
risks.
The etymological root of the term crisis comes from the ancient
Greek, κ
ρ
ί
σις
(decision or choice, from κ
ρινω
: part, separate, disconnect)
(Wieser, 2020), and the term originally referred to a decisive moment of
judgment or a turning point in the critical illness of a patient (Koselleck
and Richter, 2006). A crisis was thus a critical moment ‘when an ulti-
mate decision had to be made that required a choice between irrevers-
ible consequences, or a climax which could either result in the total
destruction or a new beginning.’ (Wieser, 2020) However, in contem-
porary usage, declarations of crisis have become so pervasive that it has
been argued that crises are no longer ‘the exceptional events they are
claimed to be, but are instead ordinary’, and indeed have to some extent
become the ‘dominant paradigm of [modern] government.’ (Agamben,
2005) Similarly, the ubiquity of the term suggests that an invocation of
crisis no longer necessarily suggests an inection point or ‘moment of
truth’ between a ‘before’ and ‘after’, but has become a persistent, sin-
gular condition, a state of ‘liminality’ (Goldstone and Obarrio, 2016)
‘between a present yet to pass and a future still to come’ (Varvarousis,
2019). The anxiety-inducing effects of living under these conditions of
so-called ‘permacrisis’ (Gordon Brown et al., 2023), have been described
and critiqued by political scientists, as representing a corrosive ‘politics
of anxiety’. Within this literature, it has been suggested that anxiety
becomes ‘a form of anaesthesia that penetrates into all pores of social
and political life, with an aim to displace time’. That is, it xes the ex-
istence of the subject in the present moment, while ‘dismantling any
dreams or illusions of a different/better future … Anxiety as a governing
practice cancels political futures… instead of reassurance, it is panic or
apocalyptic scenarios, driven by the proximity of the overwhelming
fear, which face society.’ (Eklundh et al., 2017)
The mutually reinforcing links between imaginaries of crisis and
capitalism have also been examined by scholars who have demonstrated
how imaginaries of crisis enable capitalist economies to shore up their
own functioning. For example, in the digital landscape, imaginaries of
crisis can be seen to work in the service of what has been called ‘sur-
veillance capitalism’ (Zuboff, 2018): social media algorithms favour
content that triggers strong emotional responses, such as fear, outrage,
or panic—common reactions to crises. This creates a feedback loop
whereby crisis-related content is amplied because it generates more
engagement, and the states of anxiety generated by these crisis narra-
tives prompts people to compulsively check their devices, seeking up-
dates or reassurance (‘doomscrolling’.). In this way crisis narratives can
be seen as ‘attention economy fuel’: generating prots from the main-
tenance of users’ attention, which is monetized through data collection
and advertising.
As Naomi Klein argues, in her discussion of ‘disaster capitalism’
(Klein, 2008) crises can create moments of shock that open markets to
new prot opportunities, allowing corporations to exploit public fears
for nancial gain. Additionally, corporate interests use crisis imaginaries
to push for favourable policy changes, such as deregulation or bailouts,
claiming these are necessary to stabilize the economy (Harvey, 2005).
Imaginaries of job insecurity and economic instability also help to
discipline labour, weakening workers’ bargaining power by creating
fear of unemployment (Standing, 2011). In general specic crisis
imaginaries can distract public attention from structural inequalities and
legitimize short-term interventions that support capitalist expansion,
rather than addressing deeper systemic aws (ˇ
Ziˇ
zek, 2009).
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2
The idea that the concept of crisis may be shifting our collective
experience of time has been explored by various authors. Roitman in
particular, develops the idea that the social imaginary of crisis has
become fundamental to how people understand historical and political
change (Roitman, 2014). She argues that the concept of crisis plays a
vital role in shaping historical consciousness, situating the present
moment as a departure from an imagined normalcy, and in the process,
constructing a particular trajectory of progress or decline. According to
Roitman, invocations of ‘crisis’ have become the ‘non-locus’ from which
to claim access to both history and knowledge of history. Borish notes
the ways in which crisis shapes contemporary thinking in terms of ‘be-
ginnings and endings’ in ways that obscure complexity and the inde-
terminate relationships between processes, and leads to the deeper
causes and longer term consequences being missed. The crisis framing,
she argues, is based on an ‘illusion’ of an earlier ‘normal’ time, which as
she points out, when we attempt to dene it, ‘turns out to be a constantly
changing state’ (Borisch, 2023). Whyte has also explored the specic
temporalities implied by crisis, which, he argues, negates alternative
framings of time. Particular linear understandings of time inherent to
many crisis narratives act to limit imaginative possibilities to what can
be projected, or what is considered most likely by a powerful few. He
describes ‘epistemologies of crisis’ that involve knowing the world such
that ‘a certain present is experienced as new’ (Whyte, 2020), and cri-
tiques the presumptions of unprecedentedness and urgency through
which this temporal ‘newness’ is constructed, in particular how these are
used to justify colonial oppression. Decolonial scholarship has been
critical of the ways in which environmental rhetoric, by framing the
current moment as a uniquely existential crisis for humanity, acts to
erase the ‘experiences of countless peoples and non-humans that have
[already] experienced the end of the world due to colonialism or capi-
talism’ (Terry et al., 2024), and points to the ways in which the violent
structures of colonialism and ongoing forms of coloniality were (and
remain) an existential crisis for those who have been subjected to them
(Heglar, 2019).
The potential of crisis framings to sacrice nuance or complexity, to
entrench repressive politics including coloniality and imperialism, and
to shore up and reproduce capitalist economies, have prompted some
authors to pushback against the dominance of imaginaries of crisis
(Borisch, 2023), or to suggest that ‘talking about crisis is part of the
problem.’ (Rowson, 2023) Given the multifaceted ways in which
imaginaries of crisis shape understandings of what is possible and/or
desirable in terms of social change (indeed, what is ‘thinkable’), the
crucial question is how humanity might collectively imagine within and
beyond existing imaginaries of crisis. As Hobson puts it, how can we
‘recognise the very real and signicant problems we face without ending
up in a world of emergency decrees and ‘unavoidable decisions?’
(Hobson, 2022)
One concept that emerges from the academic literature, is that of the
‘radical imaginary’ – ‘the capacity to see in a thing what it is not, to see it
other than it is’ (Castoriadis, 1975). According to Castoriadis, the radical
imaginary is crucial in opening up societal potential for transformation.
He contrasts this idea with that of traditional imaginaries which support
continuity and conformity (anchoring society in established meanings
and institutions), arguing that the radical imaginary which possesses the
transformative potential to question and reimagine those very struc-
tures. Although Castoriadis gives some suggestions of how the radical
imaginary can be sustained (including critical education, spaces that
encourage open dialogue, and participation in democratic processes),
the specicities of creating and maintaining such generative spaces and
practices is not developed in detail. Similarly although critics of the
crisis framing have identied the ‘freedom to think different in ways’
(Borisch, 2023), as being essential to effective responses to global
interlinked challenges, it remains unclear how this ‘freedom’ can be
achieved, given the pervasiveness of imaginaries of crisis. In general the
academic literature on imaginaries has not tended to centre on how
particular imaginaries might be made susceptible to change
(Varvarousis, 2019), nor how one might engage in processes to shape the
emergence of alternative imaginaries.
3. Cultivating collective imagination within/beyond crisis
It has been suggested that rather than thinking in terms of individual
or even interlinked crises, we should recognise that at a profound level,
many societies and individuals are experiencing a ‘crisis of meaning’.
Jonathan Rowson refers to this as the ‘metacrisis’, the lived and felt
experience that things no longer ‘make sense’ (Rowson, 2023). Others
have talked in similar terms of ‘spiritual crisis’ or as Rebecca Solnit puts
it, a ‘storytelling crisis’, the sense that the dominant story of capitalist
modernity (i.e. ‘that what we most want and need are things money can
buy’) runs counter to our lived experience and intuitive understanding
of a world in collapse, and the recognition that what we ‘most yearn for
are broader connection, meaning, purpose, hope and awe’ (Mowe et al.,
2023). In this context, and resonant with the idea that ‘meaning is not
something we nd — it is something we make’ (Popova, 2024), col-
lective imagination practices can perhaps best be understood as collec-
tive meaning making endeavours. These meaning-making practices can
be seen as acts of unlearning—of loosening internalized narratives of
separateness, scarcity, and linear time—and as gestures of undoing sys-
tems of thought and being that reinforce socioecological harm. Much of
this work aligns with the broad eld of ‘spiritual ecology’ (Mickey,
2020) (the ‘diverse, complex, and dynamic arena of intellectual and
practical activities at the interface between religions and spiritualities
on the one hand, and, on the other, ecologies, environments, and envi-
ronmentalisms.’ (Sponsel, 2012). Some of this work adopts the termi-
nology of the collective imagination (E.g. Collective imagination
practices toolkit, n.d), social imagination (Canopy, n.d), ecological
imagination, or the moral imagination (Moral imaginations, n.d),
although others don’t necessarily explicitly adopt these labels, but
centre and engage in imagination practices of different kinds, with the
aim of ‘nurturing elds’ (Alef Trust, n.d), or the creation of ‘generative
spaces’ (Centre for Systems Awareness, n.d) of imaginative possibility.
Collective imagination work sits at the conuence of a number of key
currents in sustainability and broader discourse. One is the growing
recognition that decolonisation—encompassing both the dismantling of
colonial structures of power and the reclaiming of Indigenous knowl-
edge systems and ways of being —is crucial for envisioning and building
more just and sustainable futures. Thus it is increasingly acknowledged
that issues of historical, systemic, and ongoing violence are intrinsic to
issues of unsustainability and social and ecological collapse (Andreotti,
2021). The other is an increasing emphasis on processes of ‘inner’
transformation as crucial to broader social transformation (Ives et al.,
2023), including a burgeoning interest in the relevance of contemplative
and spiritual practices to sustainability. In this vein there has been
growing interest in the idea of cultivating contemplative, or so-called
‘inner capacities’ to support change (see for example the ‘Inner Devel-
opment Goals’ project (IDG Foundation, 2024)), or of stressing the
importance of ‘the source and interior condition’ of actors involved in
change processes (Scharmer, 2009). Relatedly there has been a growing
interest in the relevance of virtues (Narvaez, 2020) such as love, hu-
mility and courage, to responses to sustainability challenges. Thus Mike
Hulme argues that the cultivation of virtue, which he denes as ‘prac-
tising habits of heart and life that point toward the true goal of human
existence’, ‘may be the most enduring response that we have’ to our
current predicaments (Hulme, 2014). Collective imagination practice
necessitates engaging with questions of profound meaning, about
humanity’s place in the world, a reckoning with ongoing systemic
violence which continues to characterise our relationships with one
another and within the broader web of life (Andreotti, 2021). Despite
the more secular context and tone of contemporary debates using the
language of ‘sustainability’, nevertheless, the profundity of these ques-
tions invites (or indeed requires?) engagement with both painful truths
(including facing our complicity in reproduction of violence, oppression
R. Cairns
Environmental Science and Policy 169 (2025) 104074
3
and destruction), and engaging with the ineffable and mysterious di-
mensions of our shared existence. This has led some to describe this kind
of work in spiritual/ vocational terms as ‘a deep soul calling’ (Ware,
2024).
Although much of this work is practice-oriented (and takes place
outside of academic institutional contexts), it intersects with trans-
formative transdisciplinary research (Netzer, 2012), drawing insights
and practices from across a range of social sciences, arts and humanities,
as well as explicitly engaging (as will be explored below) with teachings
and practices from beyond academia, including indigenous wisdom
traditions and spiritual teachings. Although this kind of work can be
understood as being distinct from the creative practices of individual
artists and writers, it also, to some extent complicates the boundary
between individual and collective practice. As Gomez Mont puts it,
language and imaginaries can be understood as ‘a vital force, jumping
from body to body…borrowed vitalities that then become one’s own;
ideas gathering momentum, creating space for the possible, enfolding us
all into a larger social body or collective story we are all in the midst of
telling together’ (Gomez-Mont, 2023).
Although the work of collective imagination is itself a form of
‘transformational practice’ and thus ‘practical’ in a fundamental sense,
much of this practice is also associated with distinct specic goals e.g.
catalysing different forms of action; supporting the wellbeing of activists
and marginalised groups; reconnecting people with nature etc. How-
ever, traditional notions of ‘impact’ are a poor t for describing the how
such practices might relate to wider processes of transformation. Not
only are many of these practices explicit about the notion of ‘laying
foundations’ or ‘planting seeds’ for changes that may take generations to
occur (the nature of which are in any case radically unknowable), but
this kind of work also poses a challenge to dominant, rational scientic
worldviews, and concepts often associated with understanding ‘impact’
(effectiveness, measurability etc). While some practitioners elaborate
specic theories of change, other groups engage with this work with an
intuitive sense of the work’s importance, and frame the relationship
between the collective imagination practice and broader societal change
as a form of ‘alchemy’ resulting in ‘emergence’ (Wheatley and Frieze,
2015). As the Good Grief network puts it: ‘we trust in the alchemy of our
shared conversations to bring about the liberated world of our dreams’.
Other groups such as the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute describe
the notion of change and the relationship between the micro/personal
scale, and broader social elds in terms of ‘fractals’ (Ideation Strategy
Institute., n.d) Inherent to much collective imagination work then, is a
view of social change as both deeply personal and inherently collabo-
rative. This resonates with O’Brien’s concept of ‘quantum social change’
(O’Brien, 2021), in which individuals aren’t conceptualised as isolated
agents within a vast, xed system but rather active participants in a
uid, interconnected reality. Within this framing of reality, individual
actions, attitudes, and intentions can disrupt and shape social systems in
dynamic, unforeseen ways.
An exploration of the concepts and practices of the diverse groups
working on collective imagination suggest a number of themes or
qualities that resonate across this work. These may represent useful
entry points for the cultivation of fertile spaces rich with imaginative
potential, both for the ‘composting’ of imaginaries that are no longer ‘t
for purpose’, and for the seeding of collective imaginaries of meaning
beyond crisis. These include: a recognition of the ways in which Western
scientic modernity continues to shape spaces of imaginative possibil-
ity; a resurgence of contemporary animism and a ‘re-membering’ of
humans in broader kinship with the animate earth; challenges to tem-
poralities of crisis; the honouring of emotions such as joy, hope, and
grief; and the reconnection with bodily, somatic wisdom and ritual.
Examples of particular practices will be mentioned as illustrative of
the themes, however, it is worth emphasizing that there are innite
possibilities of what might be used as a collective imagination practice,
and that, as McDowell puts it, particular practices become ‘collective
imagination practices’ when ‘combined with an enquiry which seeks to
expose the ways of imagining that keep us stuck in a degrading and
inequitable dynamic with humans and more-than-humans, and grow
ways of imagining which address that degradation and inequity.’
(Mcdowall, 2024) Ultimately, the transformative potential of the col-
lective imagination lies in its capacity to support epistemic dis-
obedience—unlearning dominant patterns of knowing and being—and to
actively participate in the undoing of harmful imaginaries that have
underpinned extractive socioecological regimes.
4. Recognising the limits of the modern scientic imaginary
Much work on collective imaginations starts from a recognition both
of the limits of science in ‘solving’ our interlinked crises, as well as
perhaps more fundamentally, a recognition of how the western scientic
world-view is itself limiting to other ways of thinking or imagining. Sci-
ence and data are an integral part of contemporary imaginaries of crisis:
visually arresting graphics of deforestation or climate change, statistics
about poverty, population, species loss etc., have been key in fostering
recognition and understanding of global problems. Western scientic
knowledge is thus key to an awareness of these problems, as well as,
commonly, being understood as crucial to the solving of these. Hence
climate protestors carry banners urging policy makers to ‘listen to the
scientists’, and the global infrastructures of science and academia pro-
duce and compile scientic data at an extraordinary rate, with the stated
aim of guiding policy making for sustainability. While scientic data are
a part of the picture in enabling humanity to better understand our
predicament, it appears that our ability to sense-make has not (and
cannot?) keep up with this deluge of data. It has been remarked that we
have never has so much ‘data’ on our problems (Sarewitz, 2004, 2011),
nor, it seems, so little ability to make sense or meaning from it (Midgley,
1991), nor to use it to reimagine and reshape our dysfunctional re-
lationships with one another and the planet. As the writer Elif Shafak
puts it, ‘we are living in a world in which there is way too much infor-
mation, but little knowledge and even less wisdom.’ (Shfak, 2024)
Despite a large body of work illustrating the limits to a purely
scientic-rational approach to solving complex, contested problems
(Rittel and Webber, 1973), or illustrating the ways in which a misplaced
reliance on ‘science’ or ‘facts’ may in fact ‘make environmental con-
troversies worse’ (Sarewitz, 2004), the cultural imaginary of ‘objective
science’ and an imagined homogenous group of ‘scientists’ who are able
to rise above politics and use objective facts to effectively steer humanity
toward a sustainable future, continues to be inuential and widespread.
In an ever more polarised world, in which facts appear increasingly
malleable, the urge to turn to an objective source of knowledge to cut
through politically motivated claims and counter-claims is understand-
able. But in the same way that ‘fact checking’ doesn’t shift political al-
legiances (Benton, 2023), neither, it seems, does increasing the amount
of data on a given ‘sustainability problem’, seem to make it any easier to
‘solve’. As Mike Hulme has put it: ‘by seeking to use science as the pri-
mary means to resolve the dilemma, we are obscuring the nature of the
dilemma itself.’ (Hulme, 2014)
From the point of view of our collective imaginations, the problem is
not simply that this vision of science is not entirely accurate, nor that the
vast majority of the data produced in this way will be ineffective in
steering society toward a more hopeful future, but that, as decolonial
scholarship has demonstrated, the dominance of the Western scientic
worldview radically constrains spaces for other imaginative possibil-
ities. Hence Arturo Escobar refers to the difcult but absolutely neces-
sary task of moving beyond the ‘constraints on thought imposed by the
onto-epistemic conguration of Western Modernity’ (Escobar, 2023).
Dominant Western scientic imaginaries, shaped by Cartesian dualism
has shaped (and limited) global collective imaginations in multiple
ways: prioritising the analytical/rational; demoting the emotional/
intuitive /embodied dimensions of knowledge, and entrenching a notion
of separation between subject and object, that shapes our understanding
of ourselves as separate from nature (and one another). Western
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4
scientic imaginaries have roots in a mechanistic worldview, in which
the universe is imagined as comparable to a machine: governed by
physical laws, and best understood through reductionist approaches
involving breaking down different complex systems into isolated parts
for study. Not only does this view obscure the relationality and inter-
connectedness of ecosystems and social systems (as is now being
revealed in complexity theory and systems science), but it renders
invisible or unthinkable alternative understandings that run counter to
this conceptualisation of a soulless, mechanistic universe.
On the other hand, many Indigenous traditions are ‘animistic’ in the
sense that the world is perceived as a vibrant living being in an ensouled
universe, populated by spirits, gods and more-than-human beings, and
this is integrated into indigenous cosmologies, ceremonies and cultural
life ways. Modern technoscience is not only deeply implicated in the
processes of colonial modernity that have been so central in erasing
many Indigenous life ways, but the dominant, deep-rooted story un-
derpinning modernity (of a meaningless mechanistic universe in which
‘only a mind can know, imagination is mere fantasy, and animism is a
primitive error’ (Harris, 2023)) continues to dominate global imagina-
tions, powerfully structuring what is perceived and believed. Much
transdisciplinary sustainability research is therefore explicit about
‘challenging dominant forms of knowledge production and the estab-
lished protocols and discourses that have contributed to marginalizing
other ways of knowing,’ (Temper et al., 2019) and this is one of the key
facets of the challenge of ‘unlearning’ emphasized as crucial by
decolonial scholars (Mignolo, 2009). However, arguably even much
transdisciplinary sustainability research is fairly analytical or ‘cogni-
centric’ (Bockler, 2021), and, in the forms and fora in which this
research is presented, perhaps does not go far enough in challenging
these dominant forms of knowing. (As Akomolafe has remarked about
civil society groups becoming more professionalised and corporate,
‘people very often take on the shape of that which they strenuously
resist’(Akomolafe, 2022)).
In the context of the profound unsustainability, and deeply disturb-
ing currents that characterise our contemporary situation, it seems clear
that the kinds of transformations that are called for require more than a
shift in the kinds or qualities of research being carried out. Calls to
reimagine our future often start then, from a recognition of the ways in
which a rational western scientic worldview continues to imprint on
the global collective imagination, hence Escobar argues that recovering
the ability to imagine other possible futures ‘requires going beyond the
modernist ontology of separation and toward an ontology that ac-
knowledges the interdependence of everything that exists.’ (Escobar,
2023) Or as ‘imagination activist’ Phoebe Tickell puts it: ‘imagining new
possibilities comes from rst throwing off the solely rational, linear and
reductionist categorisation and conceptions’ we are used to (Tickell,
2020). Among these, recognising that the imaginary of a meaningless,
disenchanted universe (Abram, 1996a) is a worldview upon which the
life-assailing business as usual depends, is a crucial rst step to imag-
ining beyond such a view.
5. Re-membering our kinship in an animate earth
Jung described the Western disconnect from the ancient idea of an
ensouled earth, or Anima Mundi over the past two centuries, as a process
resulting in ‘isolating the mind in its own sphere and in severing it from
its primordial oneness with the universe’ (Jung, 1969). According to
Harris, this isolation of the mind, and the way in which the disenchanted
modern imagination sets humans apart and ’adrift’ in a world of indif-
ferent things, engenders a ‘sickness of the soul’ (Harris, 2023), and he
cites the medieval philosopher Maimonides, who describes how ’soul
sickness’ leads to a ’dysfunctional imagination’. The (dysfunctional)
imaginary of an inanimate universe has arguably been one of the key
ways in which the exploitative patterns of industrial development and
associated violence between humans and the wider earth community
have been justied and perpetuated. Even within many mainstream
sustainability approaches that attempt to ‘x’ the problems of industrial
development, these kinds of imaginaries are still very apparent in the
many ‘control-oriented’ techno-xes to problems being promoted,
largely driven by narratives of crisis and urgency. These responses
include proposals like geoengineering to manipulate the climate, and
are reected in vocabulary such as ‘strategic management’ of global
ecosystems, and the rise of a highly professionalized ‘sustainability
sector’, focused on efciency and measurable outcomes. However, these
approaches are increasingly criticized as being rooted in the same
modernist imaginaries and socio-political paradigms that have driven
environmental degradation in the rst place. In what might be called an
‘animist turn’ (Harding, 2006) there have calls for a deeper reshaping of
the imaginaries underpinning sustainability. This involves the conscious
dismantling of the idea of a soulless inanimate, mechanical earth, and
the active cultivation of relational, embodied imaginaries of a living
world, in which humans and more-than-humans exist in kinship: a
‘re-membering’ (Animate Earth., n.d) of humanity as a full member of
the Earth community. As Bayo Akomolafe puts it, rather than ‘xing’
problems as such, the profound challenge is to ‘rekindle the realness we
have lost.’ (Akomolafe, 2022) The idea of kinship as the basis for our
relationship with nature is still fundamental to the life-ways of many
indigenous communities (Topa and Narvaez, 2022) who hold a ‘mor-
e-than-human’ understanding of place (Johnson and S., 2017), in which
‘the environment’ is known and lived as a vibrant, interactive network of
relationships in which humans, animals, plants, and other natural ele-
ments all play active roles (Salmon, 2000). As Tim Ingold has put it,
indigenous peoples ´are united not in their beliefs but in a way of being
that is alive and open to a world in continuous birth.’ (Ingold, 2006)
Some contemporary animists have drawn on the concept of ‘inter-
being’ (Hanh, 1987) as elaborated by the Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat
Hanh as a powerful philosophical framework for reimagining human
relationships with the natural world. Related to the Buddhist concept of
‘dependent origination’ (which suggests that all phenomena arise in
relation to others), the concept of interbeing implies that humans, ani-
mals, plants, and the entire natural world are part of a single, inter-
woven fabric of existence. No part can thrive or suffer alone because
each entity is intimately tied to the others.
Contra to the idea of animism as a ‘belief’, contemporary animist
writers stress that ‘animism isn’t about what is believed, but how the
world is experienced’ (Harris, 2023). Resonating with this focus on
experience, Abram (Abram, 1996a) identies writing (particularly the
emergence of the phonetic alphabet) as having played a key role in the
broad shift away from widely held animistic worldviews, and stresses
the importance of embodied sensual contact, or ‘participation’, in the
more-than-human world as a crucial aspect of re-awakening the vitality
of our imaginations. As Fideler puts it, our words and mental models
take us ‘into a disembodied, conceptual sphere’, in which we risk losing
a sense of our natural ‘bondedness with the world and the primordial
energies that shape existence.’ He suggest that if we reify our con-
ceptualisation, this can ‘deaden our perception of the living universe by
insulating us from the world of experience’ (Fideler, 2014). Examples of
practices that aim to cultivate this lived sense of kinship and interde-
pendence include for example, the ‘mirror walk’ (Macy and Brown,
1998), or ‘touching the earth meditation.’(Plum Village., n.d)
6. Questioning temporalities of crisis
As mentioned above, imaginaries of crisis have been demonstrated to
shape experienced temporalities in powerful ways. One of these is the
urgency of the crisis framing, and the attendant need to ‘act now’, and in
‘whatever way possible’, before ‘time runs out’. As Akomolafe argues,
‘the modern guration of crisis has enrolled reactionary platforms,
where the urgency of a situation is the sole argument for sidestepping
complexity and ‘doing something’ now’. He cites an African saying,
which ips this response on its head: ‘the times are urgent; let us slow
down’ (Akomolafe, 2018). His call for societies to slow down amid the
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5
urgency, is a reminder not to rush to replicate the same patterns of
thought and behaviour that produced the crisis in the rst place, but
rather to come ‘face to face with the invisible, the hidden, the unre-
marked, the yet-to-be-resolved’, to ‘linger in the places we are not used
to’. Haselmayer refers to what he calls the ‘urgency paradox’, and argues
that despite an exceptionalist narrative that the urgency of a given crisis
exempts those working to deal with the crisis from taking time to (for
example) work with local communities, such approaches will ultimately
fail, and that deep change is often necessarily, to some extent ‘slow’
(relative to our imaginings). In this vein, the Emergent Strategy Ideation
institute builds collaborations and projects that ‘move at the speed of
trust’ (Ideation Strategy Institute.,). Slowing down in order to counter
imaginaries of urgency that might replicate patterns that reproduce the
status quo, resonates with the ‘slow scholarship’ movement’s claim that
within the neoliberal shaping of the rhythms of our lives and thoughts,
slowness can be a ‘form of resistance’ (Mountz et al., 2015).
According to Macy, the hyper-speed of the industrial growth econ-
omy and its associated technologies has acted to sever imaginations of
past and future. This process is excacerbated by imaginaries of crisis
with their associations of ‘unprecedentedness’ and the politics of anxi-
ety’s ‘shrinking future’. As she puts it, we have become ‘marooned in the
present’ where ‘we are progressively blinded to the sheer ongoingness of
time’. In this context, ‘both the company of our ancestors and the claims
of our descendants become less and less real to us.’ (Macy and Brown,
1998) Thus in addition to conscious ‘slowness’, another way in which it
has been suggested that we can avoid repeating crisis-shaped patterns of
thought and open up collective imaginations to other possibilities, is
through a conscious efforts to reconnect with this ‘ongoingness of time’,
particularly through ‘keeping deep time in mind’ (Tucker, 2024). The
power of opening up of the temporal horizon in conversations around
humanity’s future is recognised in books such as ‘the Good Ancestor’
(Krznaric, 2020) and projects such as the ‘Long Time project’ (The Long
Time Project., n.d) that promote imagination and action beyond the
timeframe of a human lifespan, cultivating ‘deep time humilty’ (Roman,
2020). In eco-depth psychology, this shift toward acting and thinking
has been described as a shift from an ego-centric to an eco-centric
worldview, taking a ‘deep time’ perspective in order to act to lay
foundations for change that may take many, many generations to take
place (Plotkin, 2008). Particular collective imagination practices here
might include dialoguing with ancestors or descendants, or offering
embodied gratitude to more-than-human kin from whom we have
inherited aspects of our physical bodies (Macy and Brown, 1998).
Other practices that act to open up temporalities of crisis (in
particular as a potent way of countering the linear conceptualisations of
time inherent in crisis narratives), include different forms of collective
story-telling. For example, Terry et al. explore the art of African story-
telling as one possible dimension of decolonial worldmaking (Terry
et al., 2024). They describe the ways in which story telling ‘allows for a
messy entangling of temporalities and aspirations’ and may enable the
unpacking of alternative conceptions of time that are not linear con-
tinuations from the present into the future. Others have similarly
referred to storytelling in terms of crucial ‘emotion-symbolic work’
(Barber´
a-Tom´
as et al., 2019), or explored the power of speculative c-
tion to open up spaces of possibility for envisioning an otherwise
(Mikulan, 2024)
7. Honouring emotions: hope and joy amid grief
The maintenance of hope amidst crisis motivates much work on the
collective imagination (Hathaway, 2017). In the midst of catastrophic
narratives, decolonial scholars have pointed to the ‘emancipatory
agency’ of being able to imagine and enact a desirable future for oneself
and one’s people (Terry et al., 2024), and hope is often framed as an
antidote to self-fullling despair, apathy or passivity (Finn and Wylie,
2021). Particularly given the dynamics of fear and anxiety engendered
by the proliferation of imaginaries of crisis, the maintenance of hope and
joy, have been framed as a form of resistance (Holmes, 2017), and are
both understood as crucial to active engagement in processes of imag-
ining and building alternative futures. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, ‘[joy]
doesn’t betray but sustains activism. And when you face a politics that
aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a ne act of
insurrection’. In a similar vein, Black-led cultural collective, the Maia
group who work to foster spaces for liberatory imagination, have
referred to joy as ‘a tone, a spirit, a reclamation and act of resistance in
the face of compounding crises and forms of oppression.’ (Maia Group,
n.d)
While hope and joy are thus recognised as closely related, and both
are key to reimagining within crisis, conventional understandings of
hope have been sometimes been criticised as being forms of naïve or
delusional optimism or aligned with the so-called ‘toxic positivity’
associated with forms of corporate greenwashing. There have thus been
efforts to nuance the concept of hope. The Out of the Woods Collective
denes hope as the ’grave but positive emotion which collectively
emerges within the disastrous present, pushes against it, and expands
beyond it.’ (Out of the woods collective, 2018) The Buddhist teacher
Joan Halifax introduces the concept of ‘wise hope’. As she explains,
‘wise hope’ is distinct from conventional hope, which is tinged with ‘the
shadow of fear’ that one’s hopes will not be fullled’ (and is thus ac-
cording to Halifax, a form of suffering) (Halifax, 2021). Wise hope is
non-transactional, and not attached to outcomes. As the Czech play-
wright and dissident V´
aclav Havel famously said, hope is about ‘the
certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns
out´(Havel, 1991), and in this sense, can be understood as a guide for
how we live and what we care for. Wise hope then, is not about seeing
things unrealistically but rather ‘seeing things as they are, including the
truth of impermanence…. as well as the truth of suffering—both its
existence and the possibility of its transformation, for better or for
worse.’ (Halifax, 2021) This understanding of wise hope as incorpo-
rating ‘seeing things as they are’, explains how (what might otherwise be
understood as contradictory) practices of the cultivation of hope and joy
and the honouring of grief are both fundamental facets of many collec-
tive imagination practices.
Many people working on processes of collective imagination draw on
the pioneering work of Joanna Macy, and the ‘Work that Reconnects’
(Macy and Brown, 1998). This approach starts from the premise that
emotional pain and grief are central to how we experience connected-
ness, and that the grief that many people feel in response to the loss of
ecosystems, species, livelihoods, lives and cultures, should be honoured
as being an integral expression of our interconnectedness within these
systems, and of our shared predicament. Thus, rather than pushing
‘negativity’ away for fear that it will lead to self-fullling despair and
stie action, the Work that Reconnects approach suggests that the
opposite may be true: that ‘when we deny or repress our pain for the
world, or treat it as a private pathology, our power to take part in the
healing of our world is diminished’. Accordingly, the way to free our-
selves from our fear of pain for the world is ‘to allow ourselves to
experience these feelings… Only then can they reveal on a visceral level
our mutual belonging to the web of life’ (Macy and Brown, 1998). Grief
is fundamental to our human experience, and our imaginative capac-
ities. It can be understood in psychologist Francis Weller’s terms as ‘the
knit between’ (Weller, 2024): it is the profound expression of the rela-
tionship between people, or between people and the more-than-human
world, and when grief is repressed or dismissed, that relationship is
belittled.
Various groups work specically with grief as an integral part of
opening up collective imaginations. The ‘Good Grief Network’, a peer to
peer network which set up for people overwhelmed by ‘eco-anxiety and
climate grief’, frames the naming and exploring of painful emotions such
as grief, as a crucial part of any meaningful process through which new
ideas and renewed energy can emerge. Opening to grief takes courage it
involves ‘sitting with’ what is painful, ‘looking at the world in the mirror
to see what is real and not turn away’ (Andreotti, 2021). As the founder
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6
of the network puts it: ‘any solutions to the myriad of problems facing us,
if they are to be meaningful, will come from those of us who have been
brave enough to take the time and energy to feel these scary and dis-
orienting feelings’ (LaUra Schmidt, Good Grief Network, Founding
Director).
Others have similarly framed grieving as an inherent part of the
social reckoning involved in ‘actively shedding and dismantling the
modernist ways that have brought on the multi-pronged eco-social crisis
we now face’ (Moser and Fazey, 2021), including acknowledging our
complicity in ongoing structures and systems of violence. For example,
the Toronto Imaginal Transitions collective point to the importance of
recognising the grief associated with the ‘death and letting go of old
systems and stories that no longer serve us’, and key to their process is
holding each other through collective grieving. Particular collective
imagination practices that relate to the expression of, or honoring of
grief include the creation of ‘truth mandalas’ or ‘cairns of mourning’ (for
a description of these and other practices see (Macy and Brown, 1998)
8. Recognising and reconnecting with embodied wisdom and
ritual
Although imagination tends to be popularly associated with mental
activity, as David Abram argues, meaning making is not a purely
cognitive process, but rather it ‘sprouts in the very depths of the sensory
world, in the heat of meeting, encounter, participation.’ (Abram, 1996)
Similarly, as Joanna Macy puts it: ‘we are not brains on the end of a stick.
We are vital, juicy, esh-and-blood beings, and ideas become truly real
for us through our senses and imagination – through stories, images,
rituals that enlist our capacity for devotion, our tears and laughter’
(Macy and Brown, 1998). In what has been called an ‘embodied turn’
(Clark, 2024) in cognitive science, there have been challenges to the
traditional view that reason and imagination are abstract, detached
cognitive processes. Instead, scholars such as Lakoff and Johnson pro-
pose that our concepts and imaginative capacities are deeply shaped by
sensorimotor experiences and embodied metaphors. Lakoff and John-
son’s insights on imagination as rooted in bodily experience, underscore
the potential of embodied experience to shape collective imaginations or
open up new imaginative possibilities. Thus in many collective imagi-
nation practices, participants engage in myriad somatic practices, that is
‘practices which involve working with the body through movement,
breath, and various forms of focused bodily awareness, to effect trans-
formations in the psyche and to cultivate positive human potentials’
(Walker, 2022). Sensory, emotional, and symbolic exercises, allow in-
dividuals to feel interconnectedness rather than merely conceptualize it,
creating a visceral awareness of interdependence (within ecosystems
and communities). Embodied collective imagination practices may
enable tapping into ‘a deep, ancient, intuitive and embodied under-
standing of the human experience, in compliment (sometimes in oppo-
sition) to other ways of knowing that have become dominant’
(Gomez-Mont, 2023).
The recognition of the body as the bearer of both wisdom and
trauma, (carrying individual and collective experiences that shape how
people engage with the world), is inuential in much collective imagi-
nation practice. As Haines puts it, ‘[t]here are vast amounts of infor-
mation within our bodies and sensations. When we learn to listen to the
language of sensation, to live inside of our skins, a whole new world
opens. What is most important to us, what we long for, is found and felt
through our sensations, impulses, and an embodied knowing’ (Haines,
2019). Work in this domain often draws on the concept of ‘politicized
somatics’ as a framework for understanding how bodies are impacted by
social structures, internalized biases, and collective histories, and thus
for identifying and addressing internalized oppression. By reclaiming
the body as a site of resistance and healing, participants in these kinds of
practices can release restrictive trauma responses, fostering empathy
and enabling them to imagine new social structures rooted in equity and
care.
Another important aspect of embodied imagination practice is the
revival or creation of collective biophilic rituals, ceremonies and initi-
ation rites (Hulme, 2014). Rituals have for millennia provided the
scaffolding of meaning that shaped individuals’ life journeys, and the
sense of belonging within their communities and the broader earth
community, and are still fundamental to many indigenous cultures,
where, rather than being understood as mere ‘rote formalities’, they are
understood as fundamental and ‘life sustaining’ (Topa and Narvaez,
2022). The growing calls for a fundamental reimagining of relationships
with the natural world, at the current ‘moment of reckoning’ with the
consequences of our industrial development, has led to a ourishing of
interest in biophilic rituals and ceremonies, to provide opportunities for
remembering connectedness within the living web of life and one
another. As Haugen puts it ‘enacting ceremonies for the wild Earth as if it
matters may be a way of disrupting the deadening lters of modern
consciousness, and allowing the many other beings to come alive in our
awareness (Haugen, 2018). Ritualised practices that may enable this
‘enlivening’ of the collective imagination include diverse forms of col-
lective ceremony such as the creation of altars or offerings; group
singing; dancing, drumming, ritualised sharing of food etc. Some of
these ritualised practices aim specically at eliciting non-ordinary states
of consciousness, in order to help participants reconnect with the
mystical and an expanded sense of self and relationship in the web of life
(Lertzman, 2002), or enable individuals to ‘die to the familiar’, and open
the possibility for fundamental transformation (Nita, 2020). Such
practices might include breathwork, fasting, isolation in nature, and the
use of psychoactive plant medicines. The work of Rediscovery camps
with indigenous youth in Canada, or the work of the Animas Institute
providing ‘vision quests’ in wild settings are two examples of organi-
sations carrying out such work.
Various authors have identied the present moment and the our-
ishing of crisis narratives, as a moment of ‘global liminality’. Within rites
of passage the liminal stage is recognised as the moment ‘between
worlds’ when the person undergoing the ritual was in the ambiguous
space of becoming, neither uninitiated nor yet fully initiated. It has been
suggested that liminality is a helpful concept for thinking through ‘a
time between worlds’ when we need to ‘sit with the unthinkable, with
yet un-worded sensations, while old stories still hold us hostage.’
(Gomez-Mont, 2023) Some collective imagination processes explicitly
engage with the concept of liminality and rites of passage, as a way of
emphasizing the importance of reliquinshing of old ideas, ways of
thinking, patterns of behaviour or even personas, as a fundamental
aspect of transformation and key to the emergence of different imagi-
naries. For example, certain organisations create rituals in which
‘descent to soul’ is understood as fundamental aspect of the process of
growth and change, or in Theory U (Scharmer, 2009), ´presencing´the
future involves a conscious ‘letting go’ and ‘letting come’ in a liminal
stage at the base of the ‘U’.
9. Conclusion
As crisis narratives have amplied over recent years, there has been a
surge of interest in the cultivation of the collective imagination as a vital
aspect of transformations to sustainability. Aligned with the burgeoning
eld of spiritual ecology, a growing number of groups and organizations
are working to cultivate collective imaginations in and beyond crisis in
ways that seek to address the ‘crisis of meaning’ inherent to the
contemporary moment. This paper has sought to delineate some of the
key concepts and associated practices that resonate through this diverse
body of work, and has suggested that these may indicate generative
starting points for the creation of spaces for imagining beyond the
dominant imaginaries of crisis, with the substantial social, political, and
governance risks these imaginaries often entail. Themes include: a
recognition of the ways in which Western scientic modernity continues
to shape spaces of imaginative possibility; a resurgence of contemporary
animism and a ‘re-membering’ of humans in broader kinship with the
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7
animate earth; challenges to temporalities of crisis; the honouring of
emotions such as joy, hope, and grief; and the reconnection with bodily,
somatic wisdom and ritual.
Despite the fact that various organisations and individuals have been
working in this domain for decades, many of these ideas have tended to
remain marginal to more ‘mainstream’ sustainability discourse. How-
ever, this may be changing: funders are increasingly looking to support
this type of work, (see for example the Imagination strand of the Joseph
Rowntree Foundation’s Emerging Futures programme of funding,
including the creation of a ‘Collective Imagination Practice Community’
(https://www.jrf.org.uk/imagination-infrastructures). Imagination is
increasingly framed as ’essential work’ rather than a frivolous ‘add-on’
or ‘luxury’ (Gomez-Mont, 2023). This growing interest in collective
imagination practices speaks to a deep yearning for spaces where
imagination is ‘cherished and nurtured,’ to counter what Rob Hopkins,
founder of the Transition Towns network, has described as the ‘imagi-
native poverty’ that plagues current political thinking about possible
futures. Various authors have reected on what is required to support
such work. Undertaking the difcult and ongoing process of decoloni-
sation, particularly supporting those at the frontlines of decolonial
struggles against oppression is crucial. A key part of this is recognising
and dismantling the internalised frameworks of thought shaped by
colonial modernity. The collective ‘Gesturing toward decolonial futures’
frames this challenge in terms of ‘hospicing worlds that are dying within
and around us’ and ‘assisting with the birth of new, potentially wiser
possibilities, without suffocating them with projections’ (GTDF.,n.d).
The creation or support of ‘imagination infrastructures’ (Oldham,
2021; Robinson, 2023; Imagination Infrastructures, n.d) is a key concept
that has been proposed in this domain, and refers to the provision of
supporting conditions necessary for the collective imagination to
ourish, encompassing everything from physical spaces for gathering
and dialogue to the development of processes and practices that allow
for deep, creative engagement, and for the dismantling of imaginaries
that shore up the destructive, extractive, and exploitative practices that
have long shaped human-Earth relations. The sharing of practices and
concepts that can support processes of Collective Imagination are also an
important aspect of this work, see for example, the Collective Imagi-
nation Practice toolkit (Uose, 2024).
Others have emphasized that enabling people to rediscover a sense of
kinship with the Earth in order to reimagine the future, requires the
provision of opportunities for ‘ecological awakening,’ or for falling ‘in
love outward’ with the more-than-human world. Education is identied
as one crucial site for this to occur, with some suggesting the need for a
deep reorientation of education (Plotkin, 2008), one that recognises
education as ‘the beating heart of intergenerational transmission and
social autopoiesis, the fundamental matter of how society maintains,
renews, and transforms itself’ (Stein, 2022). Thus it is suggested that
beyond education more narrowly understood, schools and universities
might take on the role of initiating the next generation into ‘becoming
the adult humans needed to navigate the difcult future of the
Anthropocene’ (Moser and Fazey, 2021).
Although calls to cultivate our collective imaginations in times of
crisis are sometimes interpreted as implying the need for something
radically new, much of what resonates throughout this body of work
could instead be understood as a call for a deep reawakening of imagi-
nation that has become dormant within us. Framed thus, the task is not
(only) to imagine new futures but to ask: if we remember our inter-
connectedness in the greater Earth community, if we feel our kinship
with nature and one another, what becomes imaginable? What becomes
possible? Conversely, if we remember the Earth as sacred, what becomes
unthinkable? What might we refuse to accept?
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Rose Cairns: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Investigation,
Writing – original draft.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare the following nancial interests/personal re-
lationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:
Rose Cairns reports nancial support was provided by UK Research and
Innovation. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no
known competing nancial interests or personal relationships that could
have appeared to inuence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The work presented here was carried out as part of a converted Marie
Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, ‘Imaginaries in Crisis’, funded
by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [grant
number EP/Y016947/1] as part of the UK’s Horizon Europe guarantee
funding, post-Brexit.
Data availability
No data was used for the research described in the article.
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