The ongoing global pandemic and its responsive resistance movements have demonstrated the importance of visionary futures. These are multiple, alternate, and imagined realities that envision how we might practice our commitments to social injustice and inequality. Using storytelling and art to explore our lived encounters with institutions, the state, patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, has become a strategy for subverting the ways oppression works upon and through us, and has restricted the flows of creativity and alternate knowledges in our day-to-day lives.

In her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Adrienne Maree Brown posits that we are within an “imagination battle,” where she often feels “trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free” (11). brown writes that delving into our imaginations enables us to 

imagine new worlds that transition ideologies and norms, so that no one sees Black people as murderers, or Brown people as terrorists and aliens, but all of us as cultural and economic innovators (11). 

Though no fictive reality can substitute for social justice and the work that goes into it, as a starting point, or a momentary break between challenging work, we can invoke our imaginations in ways that transcend theoretical frameworks and roadblocks. 

(En)visionary futures can help create powerful forums for resistance by reimagining our relation to various institutions, economies, and states. These visionary futures can also reassess issues such as resource distribution, power systems, and relationships. By using our imaginations, we can additionally interfere with the linearity of our oppressive structures within and beyond our own timelines. How might we differently redistribute resources and consider self-sustaining agriculture? How might we reshape the public and privatized education systems to highlight alternate knowledges and approaches to learning? 

We asked for works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and media or art that envisions and creates, but also challenges what we consider reality. If our imagination is shaped by “our entire experience, our socialization, the concepts we are exposed to, [and] where we fall in the hierarchies of society,” then we should be aware of the multiple, alternate futures envisioned, in the same way that there are multiple, alternate realities (brown, 10). In our collection visions, we hope to capture the optimism and the anger that come from being an advocate and an accomplice to social justice.