Curiosity and possibility are typically subject to a novelty bias. People commonly conceptualize possibility as a harbinger of the new. What is old is already actualized; what is new is merely possible. Similarly, curiosity is thought, among scholars and lay people alike, to be piqued by and to produce the new. Repeatedly, across multiple fields an

Curiosity, we argue, is a capacity to connect—to build knowledge networks. Curiosity builds relationships between pieces of knowledge as much as between the people who want to know them. For this reason, we characterize curiosity as “edgework”—constantly laying down relationships between ideas, experiences, concepts, and objects in the world. Impor

Disabled people are consistently written out of the future, philosopher Kafer (2013) notes, and perceived as having no future. To craft futures in which both realist and nonrealist disabilities are integral to liberatory worlds, then, is to reach for adjacent possibilities otherwise ignored and dismissed. It is to relocate possibility within the va

If curiosity can be a critical comportment toward the possible, then to fully understand possibility one must also understand curiosity

Most germane for our purposes, knowledge, too, can be analyzed as a network. In this case, nodes can be pieces of information, or experiences, or words, or knowers themselves, while the edges can be the relationships between those pieces of information, those experiences, words, or knowers.

The concept of possibility has long been intertwined with the discourse of curiosity. The way things might be can disturb the way things are, but we have to be ready for it. Curiosity provides that readiness.

“experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads” (p. 12). Those silken lines are threaded and rethreaded, knotted and reknotted, to make and remake webs of sense.

Sometimes, however, possibilities are quite old—longstanding and patient. And likewise, some curiosities are ancient—questions that have been either long-touted or long-buried. How might we dispel, then, the novelty bias to which curiosity and possibility are so regularly subject? How might we better appreciate curiosity and possibility wherever th

Without curiosity, the space of the adjacent possible would exist but remain unplumbed and inactive. Curiosity then opens up adjacent possibilities, whether that means new nodes and edges or the reformulation of existing nodes and edges (and ultimately of the network itself).