Situated Imaginings
This article builds on research conducted in 2021 with Julia W. Szagdaj and Nour Abou Joude in the pursuit of Faraoyść.
We all live in someone’s imagined vision of the future. But imagination isn’t some apolitical, passive force. It’s both immensely powerful and inherently limited. Sometimes that imagined vision is broad enough to accommodate everyone — and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes these imaginations are so powerful that they have created a reality of systems that can actually limit our own ability to imagine the alternatives we want, or futures that include ourselves. adrienne maree brown writes,
“Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.” [1]
These limitations are called Situated Imaginings. And if we can find a way to push these limits, or break through them entirely, we open up whole new worlds of possibilities. So what are situated imagings? They’re something we discovered during the research and facilitation of Faraoyść — a year-long engagement with joy, imagination, and alternative futures in collaboration with Negligence Refugees from Lebanon. We learned that all of our imaginations are limited in certain ways, which are the result of the environments we grow up and live in. These borders around our imaginations are constructed by our sociopolitical and sociocultural relationships and influences, which are themselves influenced by the larger, external systems they are located within, such as colonization, capitalism, heteronormativity, globalism, etc. The term itself is an adaptation of Donna Haraways’s situated knowledges, which argues that knowledge itself is local, always filtered, and inherently partial. This is also true for our imaginations. Our imaginations are local to ourselves, filtered through our individual experiences, and partial in that it cannot encompass the whole. When we imagine, we do so from our particular contexts, which determines how and what we can imagine.
The most important thing to note, however, is that these limitations aren’t fixed. The borders can be crossed. They can be pushed on, expanded, challenged with the use of futures methods and methodologies like Faraoyść. Our research showed that when we asked participants to imagine alternatives to their current reality and create objects manifesting and facilitating those alternatives, their situated imaginings changed. By creating speculative objects, participants were able to materialize the alternative worlds they preferred and then use these objects as a jumping off point to create narrative stories that marked a shift in their relationships both to the objects themselves and to Lebanon. These narratives and the new ways participants related and used the speculative objects demonstrated that they had both surfaced and had begun to push on the limitations of their situated imaginings. One participant even told us that before this work, she was limited to traditional ways of thinking because she was limited to the reality of what she knew. Recognizing and pushing against her situated imaginings allowed her to begin to renegotiate the relationship she had between herself and Lebanon as a nation-state, and imagine new forms of protest to return to the Lebanon she knew as a home.
What this means is that by using futures methodologies like Faraoyść to expand our situated imaginings, we can begin to question and push against traditional ways of thinking and beyond the reality of what we know. We can begin to resist and reimagine oppressive systems and traditional norms in new ways. We can create new technologies born out of different worldviews, and invest in the objects they engender. Our imaginations are a way to escape, a way to live differently, a way to place ourselves in future, alternative worlds. They’re full of new rules, new systems, and new ways of being. If cared for, they can be the soil in which we can cultivate creative interventions in our “real” lives.
Do you know any examples of situated imaginings? Do you have ideas of how to expand them? Leave a comment and let’s chat!
- brown, adrienne maree. Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. United States: AK Press, 2021. Page 90
- Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
