Imagination switch – Friction and thick time in speculative worldmaking

The inability to respond to the environmental crises has been argued to stem from the crisis of imagination that underlies modernity. In response, the potentials of speculative approaches have been explored. This article presents a speculative worldmaking project conducted in a secondary school with young people. The project involved three consecutive phases, last of which is more closely examined. Next to the ideas and stories produced with young people, the paper discusses ways in which the unfolding of the project made perceptible certain challenges in schooling. Through ethnographic narrating and leaning on the concepts of friction and thick time, the article shows how speculative worldmaking can function as an ontological tool and as critical intervention. Through presenting a novel storytelling space and approach, the Living Room, it shows how space can be made for more collective and response-able modes of multispecies storytelling within a neoliberal institutional setting, in this instance a secondary school. Instead of being akin to a swich that can be turned on or off at command, imagination figures as a matter of multiple worlds, rhythms, times, and responses.