What is society's potential to be otherwise?

In these grim times, the potential for societies to advance social justice, address
unequal access to rights, undo harms, and responsibly grow more sustainable
ecologies, seems both challenging to find and ever more necessary. With dystopic developments coming increasingly to the fore, this collection of papers explores the concept of society’s potential to be otherwise and the methodological and evidentiary questions this raises. Such questions include: what is this otherwise and where is it found? How can we know? Is there evidence for any of these possibilities and what kind of evidence do we want or need? How are time and temporality addressed in thinking about futures? Is society’s potential part of its deep ontology, is it made, collectively and with effort, is it something imagined—that we can or should treat as if it existed—and what can we learn from dystopias both on the horizon and those present? These contributions address these themes through reflecting on the role of rights and civic stratification; utopias and the prefigurative; and through concepts of the moral economy.