The Mapping Future Imaginaries network is based at RMIT and is a cartography of speculations on a world to come. Mapping Future Imaginaries is a project for generating actions towards future utopias during times of immense uncertainty and flux: social, economic, environmental, and political.
Network members are scholars, artists, industry professionals, across local and global communities. The network presents different orientations, ideas and standpoints and an interconnected web of future possibilities for diverse individuals, communities and the world.
We imagine future citizens and new civics in these utopias, we imagine non-human, more-than-human futures, and social and environmental futures that shift away from the damage of current structures and prejudices. We speculate on elemental and material futures as we mine and waste resources and cause changes to our ecosystems.
Through experimental modes and practices the Mapping Future Imaginaries network explores uncommon ideas and possibilities for future living.
Rationale
Catastrophic events, most recently associated with climate and the global pandemic prompt us to urgently and critically think about the impacts of these on future society and individuals, communities, global systems, nature, and environments. Thanks to campaigns such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #StopFunding Hate, and #ChangeTheDate there is increasing awareness of the effects of disadvantage caused by exclusion and prejudice. Given this growing awareness it is clear that transdisciplinary, strategic approaches are urgently needed to proactively design for positive futures during this period of great change.
Aims
Mapping Future Imaginaries places the ideas of scholars, practitioners and experts ‘in relation’ to build an interconnected, cartographic web of strategies and aspirations for envisaging and designing future utopias.
This cartographic web will increase in density and complexity over time and will form a provocative skeleton of important practical and logistical connections between environmentalists, designers, educators, artists, medical professionals, planners, philosophers, economists and others. The diverse ways that different experts develop resilience plans and tools for managing a world that seems out of control, and for positively imagining new futures are shaped in profound ways through the connection points of their research and practice.
Mapping Future Imaginaries will initiate different activities throughout the year.
The network will form an important ideas hub that collectively addresses National Research Priorities in environmental science, and social wellbeing by featuring experts that creatively strategise for living in an altered world, improve well-being and support system resilience.
Mapping Future Imaginaries – News
- River Business and the Magic Tides at SJEC conferenceMFI member Sarah Jane Moore will be presenting on her research at the 17th Social Justice in Early Childhood conference. The event takes place online via Facebook Live on July 31st, 8.45am – 4.30pm AEST. The link to the event is: https://events.humanitix.com/copy-of-social-justice-in-early-childhood-17th-annual-conference-2021
- Event: Disorganising MetabolismsAs part of ‘Disorganising’ Marrickville School of Economics are collaborating with the School of Instituting Otherwise and the Food Art Research Network to explore economies that foster circularity, interdependence and establish bio-culturally diverse principles that circumvent capitalist paradigms of risk and profit. The workshop explores how artist led economies are reimagining collective health in a metabolicContinue reading “Event: Disorganising Metabolisms”
- Call for Special Issue: Livingmaps ReviewLivingmaps Review are opening a call for guest editors to produce a special issue of the journal for autumn 2022. The process will be in the hands of the guest editors, and you will be given full editorial freedom throughout, but you will have support from the team during the production phase. Proposals on themesContinue reading “Call for Special Issue: Livingmaps Review”
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