"Moral Imagination, Social Possibility, and Prison Abolition"

The movement for prison abolition is importantly constructive.  Abolitionists share a political vision of not only eliminating imprisonment, but creating lasting alternatives to incarceration. Appeals to common sense, moral reason, and empathy alone cannot complete this or other similarly constructive political projects. Here highlight the importance of moral imagination in radical political movements and moral revolutions, and argue that imagination can partially determine what is socially possible. I identify six distinct modes of the moral imagination, which illustrate imagination's functional role and provide a working conception of the moral imagination and its role in the movement for prison abolition. I focus on a sense of possibility I call social possibility and its central role in moral revolutions. Because moral revolutions are radical, they are also impractical—they take much effort, coordination, and revision of our beliefs, practices, and values. For this reason, determining what is socially possible requires us to engage our moral imaginations to not only fight against our reflexive conservativism, but to actively construct a vision of a better and more just world. Finally, I draw the conclusion that imagining can actually create social possibilities. 

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"Constructive Political Speculation and Fiction"

In this project, I examine the role of speculative fiction (or science fiction) in what I call "constructive political speculation," a mode of political thought that has creative, critical, and utopian elements. The structural and naturalized nature of many injustices today necessitates incorporating an imaginative or speculative element into our political and ethical thought. This type of political speculation is closely related to imagination and uncertainty, and is surprisingly multi-temporal. I argue that speculative fiction plays a central role in constructive political speculation because it is our best method of world-building, is uniquely situated to motivate political action and transform belief through the emotional component of narrative, and is explicitly open-ended in a way that other modes of political work, like theory or activism, are not.