Radical Imagination: Temporalities and Geographies of Struggle

In a world of deepening crises, of socioeconomic inequities, of environmental collapse, of resurgent fascism and institutionalized authoritarianism, what is the place of radical imagination in creating more just worlds? While some think of the work of imagination as being outside of—at a distance to, or even in a different temporality than—everyday struggle, we want to shine a light on the work of radical practice as a form of imagination. We look to anticapitalist and antiracist organizing and thought, and the complex practices in time and place through which change is not only presented and represented but produced.

The extreme Right has demonstrated consistent endurance in imagining and planning new worlds—and they have done this globally. How do we focus our collective speculative faculties into the “public production of public use values” (Gilmore and Davis 2022)—that is, how can our imaginings materialize into plans, closing the gap between our horizon and our calamitous present? How do we engage in collective imaginations that feed the immediate present, and yet travel over the long durée, reaching back into pasts to prefigure new futures? What does it mean to imagine and enact futures that are well beyond our lifetimes, and in spaces we may not yet know? How do we draw on the residue of past (internationalist) struggles, and activate them into not-yet-existing constituencies? We ask how the very concepts of time and space are themselves the terrain of imagination in struggle. 

For the 2026–2027 CPCP seminar, the Center invites fellowship applicants to consider the role of imagination in radical practices—not as a dimension separate from such praxis, or as something that is solely reserved for the aesthetic or individual consciousness. We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary and cross-community approaches to imagination as a feature demonstrable in political work, as something coterminous with its expression. Why is it important to forms of struggle today, around land, the environment, and immigration, across rights in identity, to acknowledge and understand the active role of imagination in radical change? Can the place of imagination in one struggle inspire the work of praxis in another? What are the contingencies and materialities of imagination in forms of struggle? To what extent do these enable new modes of situated contention and revolutionary possibility?