Yet it is only through imagination that we can think about the future and break free from these intellectual prisons, usually by imagining one step at a time: how to extend, add to, subtract from or graft something new onto the institutions, laws and norms around us, in what is sometimes called the ‘adjacent possible’.

If we lose faith in the future, we are likely to do less to make a better future happen. In this way, fatalism can, indeed, become fate.

When I say we need to become better storytellers, I mean that we need to become willing and skilful tellers of visionary stories of How Things Turn Out OK – like what Stephen Duncombe and the mothers at that workshop did – and work back from there. Many of us are resistant to these kinds of visions – they seem impossible, naive – and yet, who can s

future imagination involves two distinct steps, each of which is difficult. The first step involves questioning or rejecting the present, resisting its claim to be natural. The second step means constructing a plausible alternative, moving between an awareness of limits and a search for transcendence of those same limits.