Future Imaginaries – Future Visions

What futures are being imagined, foreclosed, or fought for?

Future Imaginaries gathers writing that examines how futures are constructed — and contested — in the present. Every society lives inside an imagined future. Whether hopeful or catastrophic, promised or denied, these visions shape political decisions, cultural production and everyday behaviour. This section is not about prediction. It is about power. Who gets to imagine the future? Whose visions are treated as realistic, and whose are dismissed as impossible? As ecological crisis, technological acceleration and political instability reshape the horizon, these questions have become urgent.

Pen vs Sword approaches the future as a contested space — shaped by literature, ideology, activism and systems of knowledge. Articles here engage with dystopian warnings, alternative worldviews and structural change, asking how imagination itself becomes political terrain. Future Imaginaries invites you to look beyond inevitability. It treats the future not as a fixed destination, but as something actively produced — through decisions, narratives and resistance.

In Future Imaginaries we return repeatedly to the tension between possibility and constraint. Some futures are endlessly rehearsed — collapse, surveillance, endless growth — while others struggle to be articulated at all.

Literature plays a key role here, particularly speculative and dystopian writing that functions as social diagnosis rather than escapism. These works reveal present anxieties by projecting them forward, turning imagination into critique. Another strand focuses on systemic alternatives. Articles examining post-capitalist thinking, ecological responsibility and political evolution ask what might lie beyond current frameworks — and why such thinking is so often marginalised. Environmental futures also loom large. Climate crisis forces a confrontation with limits, responsibility and interdependence, challenging dominant narratives of progress and control.

What unites these pieces is a refusal to accept the future as inevitable. Future Imaginaries insists that imagination is not neutral — it is shaped by power, but also capable of resisting it. By examining how futures are framed, the section keeps open the possibility that different outcomes remain possible.

The Featured articles on power and possibility below explore how futures are imagined, constrained and fought over. Addressing themes of climate, technology, politics and cultural expectation, these pieces treat the future not as a neutral horizon but as a contested space shaped by power in the present. Read together, they ask which futures are presented as inevitable, which are foreclosed, and where imagination becomes a tool for resistance, renewal or radical rethinking.

Power operates not only through law, force or institutions, but through expectation. The futures we are taught to anticipate — climate collapse as destiny, permanent precarity as normal, endless growth as necessity — quietly discipline the present. When particular outcomes are framed as inevitable, alternatives are not argued against; they are simply removed from view. Imagination becomes narrowed, and political possibility contracts. What feels “realistic” begins to mirror what is most convenient for existing systems of power.

By examining how futures are narrated, contested and foreclosed, Future Imaginaries treats imagination itself as political terrain. It asks who benefits when horizons are limited, whose interests are served by managed despair or techno-optimism, and where cracks begin to appear in dominant narratives. Within those cracks sit speculative thinking, radical hope, and cultural experiments that refuse inevitability. This section is not about prediction, but about permission: the permission to imagine otherwise and to recognise that the future is not something that arrives fully formed, but something actively shaped, struggled over and made.