Quotations

“Visions creature tension between what is, and what could be.”

- Ruud van der Helm, The vision phenomenon: Towards a theoretical underpinning of visions of the future and the process of envisioning, Futures 41 (2009) 96–104

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“If we have the ability to create stories around these preferable visions of futures, do we then have some sense of agency and ownership over what the future becomes?”

- Radha Mistry, Foresight Practitioner, 2024 -- Future Feelings podcast

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"Positive Envisioning. We create the conditions for the reality that we want to exist"

- Barbara Arnwine, Transformative Justice Coalition

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"The North Star is 323 light years away from Earth. Sometimes, Beloved Community can feel just as far. But the point isn’t about whether or not we can get there. Whether or not we believe Beloved Community is possible, it is still our guiding star. Whether or not we’ll end 

oppression, overcome violence, or reconcile all conflict is not the point. The point is to always be walking in the direction of freedom."

- Haga, Kazu. 2020. Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm

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“Vision is an invisible field that binds us together, emerging from relationships and chaos, and information.”

- adrienne maree brown. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Future thinking disrupts the taken-for-granted nature of the present.”
- Ruth Levitas, 2013,  Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society

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​“In this spirit of adventurous learning, we can practice stretching our minds across time.”
- Vincent Ialenti, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

 

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"But now is the time to think like poets, to envision and make visible a new society, a peaceful, cooperative, loving world without poverty and oppression, limited only by our imagination.”

Robin D. G. Kelley. 2002. Freedom Dreams: the Black radical imagination

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"By showing how bodies make articulate choices based on their intelligent assessment of other bodies, the essay frames a new perspective on individual agency and collective action."

- Susan Leigh Foster. 2003. Choreographies of Protest

"We need utopias today, and we need the people who choose to try to live their good life

today in experimental communities, because they just may help us find the way forward

out of the morass brought about by those ideologues willing to impose their version of the good life on all of us."

- Lyman Tower Sargent. 2006. In Defense of Utopia.

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[Utopian Thinking is a] "prefigurative and transformative practice: [...] the attempt not

just to imagine, but to make, the world otherwise”

- Ruth Levitas. 2013.  Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society

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“To paint a picture of society as it could be. This is the role of the utopian. And to do so by articulating people’s strong if inchoate emotions, crystallizing them and presenting them back in the form of a vision”

- Darren Webb. 2016. Educational Studies and the Domestication of Utopia.