This line of research explores how eco-social futures take shape both materially – in infrastructures, practices, and everyday routines – and as circulating imaginaries in policy, media, and culture. We trace latent futures already in the making and relate them to eco-social imaginaries in order to identify convergences, tensions, and translations across scales and time horizons. These imaginaries play a central part in the individual and collective creation of present lives, shared paths towards the future, and glances towards the past. In recent decades, awareness of the consequences of living in human-made times – of being both children and makers of the Anthropocene – has become widely discussed across the planet. However, experiences and understandings of this human-made epoch are diverse, as are the imaginaries through which these new times are expected to 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. 

For this reason, we focus on imaginaries of the future as an integral part of analysing reciprocal relational processes within and between global social constellations. We bring these imaginaries into dialogue with futures-in-the-making and the latent futures that already shape trajectories, developing a conceptual framework to analyse convergences, tensions, and translations across scales and time horizons.

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.