Recap: Imagination Infrastructure with Keri Facer
19 March 2026 - A summary of the lecture
What problems are we trying to solve?
Keri began with a deceptively simple starting point: the term imagination infrastructure has been circulating, particularly within the work of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. But what does it actually do? What problem is it trying to address?
At first glance, the answer seems familiar. We are living in what many describe as a polycrisis — overlapping social, ecological, and political challenges. Increasingly, this is framed as a crisis of imagination.
Three strands of this argument surfaced:
People struggle to imagine alternatives to current economic and social systems
People struggle to imagine how bad things could become
Institutions — especially governments — lack the capacity or willingness to imagine differently
This framing is not unfamiliar to those working in futures studies. And yet, as Keri pointed out, it may not be entirely accurate.
Because when we look more closely, imagination is not absent.
It is everywhere.
Not a lack of imagination — but a question of whose
Drawing on insights from scholars and practitioners, Keri introduced a crucial reframing:
This is not a crisis of imagination.
It is a crisis of whose imagination counts.
In classrooms, in communities, in everyday life — imagination is abundant. But much of it is marginalised, suppressed, or rendered invisible.
At the same time, dominant forms of imagination — often tied to technological expansion, economic growth, and existing power structures — are amplified and sustained.
As Keri noted, there is not too little imagination. In some cases, there may even be too much of the wrong kind.
What is missing, then, is a particular form of imagination:
A critical creative imagination — one that can move beyond existing social arrangements, draw from diverse lived experiences, and open up possibilities for transformation.
Thinking infrastructurally
This shift changes the question.
If imagination is not lacking, then the issue becomes:
What enables — and what suppresses — critical creative imagination?
This is where the idea of infrastructure becomes useful.
Rather than thinking of infrastructure only as physical systems (roads, transport, water), Keri invites us to see it more broadly:
As flows of resources, ideas, and relationships
As systems that connect, distribute, or block
As structures that determine who is included and who is excluded
Infrastructure is not neutral. It shapes what moves, what stays, and what disappears.
Applied to imagination, this raises important questions:
Whose ideas circulate, and whose are marginalised?
What narratives are reinforced, and which are interrupted?
What connections are possible — and which are blocked?
What is imagination, really?
Before we can build any kind of “infrastructure,” we need to understand what imagination is.
Here, Keri drew from multiple fields — psychology, sociology, decolonial theory, and ecological thinking — to offer a rich, layered view.
Imagination is:
A core human capacity, through which we make sense of past, present, and future
A social process, shaped through everyday interactions and cultural narratives
A site of power, where dominant imaginaries can both enable and constrain
An ecological practice, involving relationships with human and non-human others
Crucially, imagination is both inherited and generative. It is shaped by histories of inequality and dominance — and yet it also holds the potential to question and move beyond them.
This dual nature is important.
We are always imagining within systems — and sometimes, against them.
So what actually supports imagination?
At one point, the project reached a kind of impasse.
If imagination is everywhere — in art, media, conversations, education, everyday encounters — then everything could be considered imagination infrastructure.
Which makes the term almost meaningless.
The way forward came by narrowing the focus: not imagination in general, but critical creative imagination.
When viewed this way, certain enabling conditions become visible.
Across education, futures studies, design, and social movements, a pattern emerges. Imagination flourishes when:
The familiar is made strange
People are recognised, valued, and seen
Desire and longing are cultivated
Dominant narratives are questioned
Multiple perspectives are encountered
Process is valued over product
But perhaps most importantly:
Imagination thrives through encountering difference — through contrast, conflict, and comparison.
Lessons from social movements
Rather than staying only within theory, Keri pointed to social movements as living examples of imagination infrastructure in action.
These movements reveal that critical imagination is sustained through:
Long-term relationships, not one-off interventions
Collective reflection on lived conditions
Rituals and practices that keep knowledge alive
Encounters across difference, beyond one’s immediate community
Access to archives, histories, and memory
Resistance to knowledge monopolies
Imagination, in these contexts, is not an isolated act. It is social, relational, and sustained over time.
The infrastructures we actually have
If this is what supports imagination, what does our current landscape look like?
Keri offered a sobering reflection.
We are operating within infrastructures that:
Reinforce echo chambers and algorithmic bias
Limit encounters with difference
Privilege global platforms over local specificity
Leave many archives fragile and unsupported
Sustain dominant narratives while marginalising others
Build alliances that are temporary and unstable
In such conditions, imagination is not absent — but it is shaped in particular, often limiting ways.
What does this mean for futures practice?
This brings the conversation directly back to us — as a futures community.
What role might futures thinking play in cultivating imagination infrastructure?
Keri offered several provocations.
We may need:
Fewer workshops, more relationships
(“More churches, not weddings”)More attention to unlearning, not just imagining
Stronger collective and institutional work, beyond fragmented efforts
Better bridging between grassroots imagination and policy structures
Deeper reflection on whose imagination we are supporting
New ways of engaging within digital environments
And perhaps most importantly:
The work of imagination is not fast. It is slow, relational, and often uncomfortable.
Closing reflection
This session did not offer a neat definition of imagination infrastructure.
Instead, it unsettled the term — and in doing so, made it more meaningful.
What stays with me is not a framework, but a shift in attention:
From how do we generate more ideas?
to
what conditions allow certain imaginations to live, and others to disappear?
And perhaps, more quietly:
What might it mean to cultivate imagination — not as a technique,
but as a shared, relational practice over time?
At the request of the speaker, the recording for this session is not made publicly available here but rather can be requested via email.
With thanks to Keri Facer for a deeply thought-provoking conversation, and to everyone who contributed to the discussion.
Relevant work:
Imagination and the Future University: Between Critique and Desire Open Access
Keri Facer
Critical Times (2022) 5 (1): 202–216.
https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-9536559
This conversation is part of an ongoing journey on imagination we are holding throughout 2026 at The Futures Studies Channel. Across the year, we will explore imagination from multiple perspectives — through dialogue, practice, and shared inquiry — engaging questions of intuition, ethics, infrastructures, and lived experience. We warmly invite you to join us as we continue to deepen how imagination is understood, cultivated, and cared for in the worlds we are shaping together.
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