This line of research focuses on social imaginaries and radical imagination, particularly in the case of (the) imaginaries of the future. These imaginaries play a central part in the individual and collective creation of our global present lives, our shared paths towards the future and our glances towards the past. In the recent decades the consciousness and palpable consequences of living in human-made times, of being children and makers of the Anthropocene, has become widely discussed all over the planet. However, our experiences and understandings of this human-made epoch are diverse and so are the imaginaries of how these new times will shape the spaces and places we inhabit, the relations we establish with each other and our environment, our own lives and the lives of those who will come after us, human and non-human. Working on (and with) the future has become an urgent matter on a global scale.

It is for this reason that we propose to dedicate our efforts to mainstreaming the concept of imaginaries of the future as an integral and crucial part of the analyses of reciprocal relational processes within and between global social constellations, bringing into a dialogue the literature that has dealt with imaginaries and imagined futures, and generating a new conceptual framework that dialogues with the futures-in-the-making and the latent futures that already pave our way.

In this journey across time, in which we are all travelling together since our birth, our spaces of creating, imagining and envisioning futures that are not hegemonic, expected, anticipated, and mainstreamed tend to become less viable, and hence divergent and diverse imaginaries of the future less visible, thinkable, even desirable. In this respect, and as an answer to these tendencies, we will engage in an intersectional, decentred, politically and ethically accountable journey to explore the traces of imaginaries of the future in global literature (fiction and non-fiction) as well as in cinema and other cultural realms.