Who gets to imagine the future?

getting my thoughts out before they eat me

I went to a workshop today called Culture, Climate & the Power of Imagination, facilitated by Rob Hopkins, author of How To Fall in Love With The Future . The premise was simple and generous; imagination is essential if we are to build liveable futures. Before policy, infrastructure or technology, there must be the ability to imagine something different. To fall back in love with the future.

It was beautiful. It was inspiring. And it left me with a sense of discomfort.

Because imagination is not evenly available.

Imagination requires room. It needs time, we don’t all have the same 24hrs in a day. It requires a margin of safety. When your life is structured by precarity, uncertainty or exhaustion, imagination can feel inaccessible.

This isn’t a failure of imagination. It is a failure of conditions.

My research looks at socially engaged arts organisations in post-industrial South Yorkshire. What I see there is that imagination is not something you can demand. It emerges in spaces where people feel recognised, where participation is possible and where uncertainty can be held without needing to be resolved. These organisations don’t begin by asking people to imagine different futures. They begin by creating the conditions in which imagination can return.

Looking around the room, I became aware of who was present and who was not. A coalition of the willing? We were already invested in these ideas. The majority of us already working (and being paid for it) at the coal face of imagination. This raised a difficult question, what does it mean when imagination circulates primarily among those who already have access to it?

Whose futures were being imagined? And whose absence made that imagining possible?

This isn’t a criticism of the event itself, which was thoughtful and well held. It is a reflection on the wider structures that shape who gets to participate in imagining at all. Because imagination does not exist outside power. It is shaped by who has time, who has safety, who has recognition and who feels entitled to participate.

In the places I work and the organisations I work with, imagination emerges slowly, through shared meals, creative practice and the steady work of building trust. It emerges when people feel able to show up as they are tired, uncertain, unfinished and when care and participation are present.

This makes me wonder if the real work is creating the conditions that make imagination available.

What would it mean to begin from where we stand? To recognise that imagination grows from belonging and recognition, from the slow work of building shared ground. What if care were treated as infrastructure or currency? What if tiredness were recognised as rational, rather than something to be overcome? What if imagination were understood not as an individual capacity, but as something collectively sustained?

If imagination is to play a meaningful role in responding to climate, social and civic uncertainty, then the question is not only how to inspire it, but how to support the conditions that sustain it. This means paying attention to who is present, who is absent and what makes participation possible.

These questions sit at the centre of my research, which explores how socially engaged arts organisations design conditions for hope. Creating environments in which people can remain present to one another and to possible futures, even in contexts shaped by loss and uncertainty. I am interested in how imagination becomes possible not as an abstract capacity, but as something grounded in care, participation and shared civic life.

I left the workshop inspired by the generosity of the space and the urgency of its questions. I also left with a sense that this conversation is still unfolding. I would welcome opportunities to continue it particularly with those working to understand not only how we imagine different futures, but how we create the conditions in which more people are able to participate in imagining them.

The future is not only something we imagine. It is something we make room for, together.

Further reading:

Ruha Benjamin https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/imagination-a-manifesto

Salena Godden https://roughtradebooks.com/products/pessimism-is-for-lightweights-hardback-salena-godden

Lola Olufemi https://www.hajarpress.com/books/experiments-in-imagining-otherwise