Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has said, “The future is that openness of becoming that enables divergences from what exists.”(2) The opportunity of speculative design is to expose the presuppositions, regularities, and restraints of reality and to dare to look into the untrodden, subversive, and ambiguous. (3) The designs on this platform are therefore not meant to offer a complete account of what our futures could look like, or to argue for one specific solution. They are here to open up space for reflection, critique, and provocation on the actors, narratives, institutions, and regulations that could shape our future economies. 

It is critical to note that speculative design and futures thinking are not a disconnected end-state, but rooted in both the past and the present. It is therefore not surprising that the practice of thinking about and designing the future has been male-dominated and male-biased, and has been centered around Western views of progress through science and technology. Anthropologist Arturo Escobar points out that design practices in many ways have erased indigenous worldviews, forms of knowledge, and ways of being through its singular view of ‘modernity’ and have thus come to colonize our imaginations of the future. (4) 

PORTALS TO FEMINIST ECONOMIES is therefore, most of all, an open invitation to all of us to reclaim our imagination and actively dream up the types of lives and systems we desire, build alternative narratives, and experiment in ways that help build a movement.

(1) Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2015), 4.

(2) Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminist Futures?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21, no. 1 (2002): 18.

(3) Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013)

(4) Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018)