About the Collective Imagination Practice Community

What is the Collective Imagination Practice Community? 

The Collective Imagination Practice Community evolves collective imagination practice. We are funded by JRF Emerging Futures team, hosted by Huddlecraft, Canopy & CPI.

On This Page:

  • What is The Collective Imagination  Practice Community?

  • What We’re Trying to Do

  • 10 Reasons why Collective Imagination is Important

  • What do we mean by Collective Imagination Practice?

What We’re Trying to Do

By resourcing work that invites more people to practise Collective Imagination, we are trying to:

  • Pay attention to who gets to imagine and support the work that centres a diverse range of imaginations.

  • Through that work, draw on, value and cultivate a range of diverse world views and ways of knowing.

  • Seed entirely new patterns, in new soil, by creating tools and practices to enable people to imagine more hopeful futures. As Donna Haraway says, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with.”

  • Spread the practices which will support people to wake up to other worlds being possible. Grow their capacity to do this work, and mobilise them to action. 

  • Maintain a relationship to the unknown, aware that by working in this space, we must constantly find ways to perceive things differently or anew. In his essay on Planetary Thinking Philosopher Yuk Hui says that “in order to regain the future we must nurture our relationship to the unknown.” Imagination is an important way for us to experience novelty and impossibility, which in turn enables us to expand the horizons of what we thought possible.

If you would like to join us in our journey of exploration, please join the Collective Imagination Practitioners Community, sign up to our co-learning sessions, and dig into our further resources below.

10 Reasons Why Collective Imagination is Important

  1. We are living in times that require us to imagine things we may find hard to even perceive, understand or feel. Even those who practice imaginative foresight have been culturally conditioned to limit the horizon and the scope of possibility - so drastically that we struggle to conceive of “plausible and desirable futures.”

  2. Changing our relationship with the future, and in turn creating more equitable and livable futures, comes back to how we might change our imagination about the future. There are limitations to only engaging people to think about the future in an analytical and rational way. Collective Imagination Practice enables us to see, feel and think differently, in order to act differently.

  3. Investment in this work is vital for communities to be able to shape their futures. Nourishing Collective Imagination opens up pathways of possibility that were previously unimagined or numbed and it equips communities to respond in new ways.

  4. Who gets to imagine the future, shape it and act on it, really matters. This community power in action when the ideas have arisen from the collective imaginations of the community and then translate it into the policies and resource flows of a place.

  5. Just like with narrative work, advocacy or campaigning, or policy, Collective Imagination is a craft and a practice in its own right. It is a practice that starts by reframing the world around us in radically new ways, because of shifts in perception and mindset.

  6. The enormity and complexity of challenges both now and ahead of us will require the destabilisation of today’s dominant agendas, giving more credibility, visibility and coherence to alternative possibilities. Collective Imagination work is an active divestment from the status quo, bringing ways to unsettle the present and open up pathways of possibility.

  7. Collective Imagination is a practice that, like a muscle, can be strengthened, and made richer over time. We need to keep investment in it, otherwise we will keep falling back into the familiar

  8. It is related to, but distinct from, complimentary ideas and approaches:

    • Futures & foresight work - which focus more on scanning the horizon of what is already coming, rather than creating the conditions to imagine and construct new, alternative futures.

    • Narrative work - which shapes our understanding of the world but does not necessarily open the door to radically reimagining it

    • Deliberative democracy - which enables people to come together to collectively decide upon the future, but does not in and of itself require that future to be different from the present.

  9. Exceptional times require an exceptional type of imagination, so, in the midst of multiple and historical crises, it’s important for us to walk ourselves into what we cannot entirely foresee at this moment. To untether ourselves from ‘reality’ as it is now, because it is really no longer working, and step into the unknown.

  10. If you’ve got to the end of this list and you’re still not sure this work is relevant to you, ask yourself this: Are things going well for us as a community, a country, a planet, a species? And if they are not going well… what might be required to ensure something different (and better) can emerge? Do we know what to do? Do we have all the answers? Or do we need to draw on something else?

What do we mean by Collective Imagination Practice?

 

Whilst we think it’s important to bring clarity to what we mean by ‘Collective Imagination’, we don’t mean to define it or try to ‘own’ a definition of a practice that is rapidly emerging.

We know that many people are doing this work under terms such as social imagination, decolonial imagination, the Black imagination, civic imagination, municipal imagination, temporal imagination, ecological imagination, moral imagination, imagination justice, interspecies imagination, public imagination, political imagination and the unimaginable.

We also know this work happens within communities of social foresight, afro-futurism, social dreaming, ecological arts practice, social arts practice, narrative practice, cultural work and many more.

So, instead of offering a definition, we offer a list of characteristics of the work we’re especially keen to resource:

  1. It’s practice based. What is being learnt is being learnt through practice.

  2. It’s rooted in growing the capacity of people to see more possibilities, to shift their perception, to draw on different senses, to re-wild their ideas, to stretch their thinking, to connect to new or different feelings, to untether from familiar or entrenched idealism and more.

  3. It’s work that emphasises the collective. What can the collective imagine or dream that an individual never can? How are we resourcing this work to be done in community and in ways that honour our interdependence?

  4. The practices can lead to material change and shifts. We care that this work isn't done in isolation or on the periphery and are keen to deepen and strengthen work that will influence or shift decision-making or cause resources to flow differently.

  5. It’s multidisciplinary. The practices might draw on somatics, or other kinds of embodiment work, connecting to future generations, or ancestors. It might include working with the land, the more-than-human world, with dreams and with planetary intelligence. There might be methods from social foresight, narrative therapy, myth-making and more.

To discover more about different Collective Imagination practices and how the work is being used in place, visit imaginationinfrastructuring.com