A research workshop for ten feminist scholars who have recently embarked on a collective project to develop understandings of ‘prefigurative’ and ‘utopian’ modes of contemporary politics and approaches to fundamental political-economic change – what J. K. Gibson–Graham (2006) called the new ‘politics of possibility’. Of particular concern is how we can learn from, and learn to produce, the rich knowledges of possibility which emerge in global projects to create alternative, post-capitalist forms of life – many of which are rendered invisible or unintelligible by what the Brazilian sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006) calls the ‘sociology of absences’ – and whether and how we can operationalise the ‘sociology of emergences’, a critical knowledge of emergent possibilities in thought, collective action and social inquiry. This interdisciplinary, multinational and cross-sectoral group, which aspires to become a research, writing and practical collective, believes that such work is vital to the advancement of both our critical knowledge of society and the new politics of dignity, autonomy and buen vivir (living well).

The participating scholars, who are at different stages of career and based in universities and social movements in Australia, Mexico, The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, are each conducting doing cutting-edge work in methodology, theorization and experimental practice which addresses these questions. In different ways, their work transgresses established disciplinary boudaries and theorizes these as political problematics, seeks radical new ways of knowing and transforming ‘reality’, is situated in and beyond Eurowestern social scientific cosmologies and rooted variously in reason, land, dreams, the body and the commons, is practiced both within and beyond conventional institutions of learning and research, and emerges from within the reality it seeks to transform.