IMIC: Imaginaries in Crisis

The language of crisis has become ubiquitous in contemporary sustainability discourse, associated with the proliferation of terms

such as 'climate emergency'; 'tipping points'; 'catastrophic threat' and 'societal collapse'. While the political effects, and governance

implications of crisis framings in the context of specific sustainability issues have been long recognized and critiqued, there has been

little systematic attention paid to the relationship between crisis and the collective imagination more broadly. In the absence of

sufficient theorising of these dynamics, there is a risk that sustainability discourse and practice becomes complicit in closing down

imaginative spaces of possibility through allowing crisis thinking to dominate the map of possibilities. Empirically grounded in the

context of imaginaries of agricultural transformation in the Galapagos Islands, the present project seeks to examine the ways in which

crisis narratives shape imaginaries of sustainability, and with what implications. The project will bring together STS scholarship on

sociotechnical imaginaries, feminist and decolonial scholarship on the politics of crisis, and insights from affect theory, with a view to

deepening conceptual understanding of the relationship between narratives of crisis and imaginaries of possible futures, and

contributing to academic and policy debates around 'transformations to sustainability' in Galapagos and beyond. In the tradition of

sustainability action-research, the proposed project sets out to learn from and intervene in Galapagos context: to build theoretical

insights with broad academic and societal relevance 'from the ground up' through detailed ethnographic fieldwork with diverse

actors working to re-imagine agriculture in Galapagos at the confluence of multiple narratives of crisis; and to open up 'spaces of possibility' for imagining sustainable food futures in the archipelago.