WP345 The politics of future re-imagination: Sociolinguistic approaches

This chapter takes issue with the idea of “crisis” as the entry point to the volume, outlining the importance of considering the failed future promises of the past. Against the background of seemingly hopeless times, it conceptualises re-imagination as a fruitful terrain for examining social and linguistic practices whereby groups interpret and try to reformulate their present struggles with an eye to their pasts and plausible futures, and to the larger material and symbolic infrastructures that these practices may contribute to (dis)enable. The chapter introduces a sociolinguistic framework to the study of utopias, dystopias and hope, and reviews developments in, and critiques of, commoning projects that involve “everyday utopias” which perform regular daily life in a radically different fashion to build alternatives to dominant practices. Anchored in such developments and critiques, it advances a critical and ethnographic lens to the analysis of daily practices mediated by language, discourse, narrative and communication, with the hope that this may also allow considerations of how sociolinguistic knowledge production can contribute to re-imagining the future of the discipline. The chapter closes with a roadmap to the rest of the volume, with a view to the contexts, issues and tensions explored by the contributors.