Acts of organising: exploring contemporary imagining of desirable futures

This thesis is submitted for the fulfilment of the PhD programme at Loughborough University. It explores the spaces of collective imagination by focusing on how the spatiality of organising can enable the imagining of desirable futures and the nature of these futures envisioned by actors working in sustainability-aligned roles. The researcher has adopted a developmental stance and is inspired by the principles of engaged scholarship. This research uses a transdisciplinary approach to leverage concepts that address complex, real-world phenomena. It seeks to reinforce the understanding that desirable futures are dynamic, emergent, and relational. The research begins with conceptual expansion, progresses through methodological innovation, and culminates in empirical application, making transdisciplinary contributions to both theory and practice. One of the overarching contributions of this thesis is to establish the value of transdisciplinarity, research through design, and the spatial aspects of organising that enable collective imagining of desirable futures. The primary research strand is qualitative, adopting multi-sited, para-ethnographic methodologies and creative research methods. Fieldwork was conducted at 'extra-work events' in London and Brighton (United Kingdom), Helsinki (Finland), and online, exploring how organising adjacent to everyday work can support the emergence of transformative ideas and sow seeds of organisational and societal change.The thesis is structured around three stand-alone yet interrelated papers, each contributing to the understanding of collective imagining of distant desirable futures in the context of organising. The first paper seeks to develop the theoretical underpinning by contributing to the understanding of how imaginings towards long-term futures arise by developing and extending the conceptualisation of the sites of hyperprojectivity introduced by Ann Mische in 2014. The second paper is developed through the identification and research into hyperprojective field sites. It demonstrates the value of the complementary application of multi-sited and para-ethnographic methodologies in contemporary ethnography through research conducted in interstitial spaces called extra-work events. Additionally, it advocates integrating contextually adapted visual methods to enhance research in these dynamic, fast-paced, and complex settings. The third paper examines the role of organising in facilitating the emergence of distant future imaginings through both visual and textual contexts, positioning imagining as an active conceptual process enabled by organising. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of the nature of distant future imaginings by situating them within the context of prefigurative politics and conceptualising them as prefigurative impulses.Beyond these contributions, the thesis includes two practice-based experiments that follow an embodied approach to learning and spatiality, and are grounded in research through design (RtD). These experiments illustrate the potential of transdisciplinary academic research in shaping impactful activities and future research directions. By integrating insights from different disciplines and resisting fragmentation, this research seeks connection and synthesis. In doing so, it views the research landscape of sustainability as an evolving system of relationships.