We invite expressions of interest for contributions to a planned special issue of Australian Feminist Studies exploring how feminist methodologies are involved in making futures. We do this in the context of growing interest in practice research and creative interdisciplinary approaches and methodologies, which might further engage with, build on and push feminist concepts, methods and practices.
Re-imagining worlds and re-making futures have always been central to feminism and its intersections with other minoritarian movements, including queer, Black and anti-racist, disability, and class-based practices. Feminism can therefore be understood as necessarily future-making, and futures are not only about what’s next but also thinking and working differently with and about the past and present.
Fresh ideas, alternative imaginings, and hopeful approaches are needed more than ever at a historical moment of climate breakdown, pandemics, war and the resurgence of right-wing politics, political upheaval and poverty. What role do and might feminist methodologies, with their prioritisation of ethical and political questions and interventions, have in creating futures?
Potential questions for consideration include but are not limited to:
- How might feminism create futures?
- What kinds of futures are needed? What kinds of fresh futures might feminism help to make?
- What world-making practices might feminism (further) develop and/or invent?
- What kinds of feminist imaginations should be cultivated, and how?
- In relation to all of these questions: How are and might feminist futures be entangled with the making of other minoritarian futures, including those concerned with race, class, dis/ability, sexuality?
Potential methods through which to consider these questions include but are not limited to:
- Creative writing
- Speculative fabulations
- Science fiction
- Digital investigations
- Experimental ethnographies
- Imaginative entanglements and inventive interviews
- Material mappings or moving encounters
- More-than-human collaborations
- Reconstructions – makings and doings
- Objects – mundane and extraordinary
- Performances and re-enactments
- Sensory embodiments
- Time travelling - Slowing or speeding engagements
- Socio-technical happenings
