Dreaming Feminist Futures
A Playbook for Radical Imagination and Collective Action
This playbook is for activists and movements interested in exploring futures thinking, and for futures and foresight practitioners who want to strengthen a feminist lens on their work. It is intended as a resource for all who wish to imagine and co-create systemic transformations for better and fairer collective futures.
Why do we need to dream feminist futures?
While dreaming may seem like a luxury, it is precisely in moments of crisis and uncertainty that we must advance collective hope, imagination, and agency. Dreaming is not an escape, but a critical tool. The practices in this playbook equip activists and movements to identify openings for systemic transformation, find new and more effective ways to cultivate change, and to nurture the feminist futures already emerging.
“There comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness . . . That time is now.”
— Wangari Maathai
The Playbook
We invite you to find your own way through a living landscape of feminist imagination and experimentation.
Our only suggestion is to explore our Feminist Principles first, as they underlie all the practices here. Then, go to Connecting, if you need some ideas of how to prepare the space for a meaningful gathering.
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Connecting
How do we create a caring invitation and gathering?
Design a space that supports meaningful participation and creates the conditions to dream together.
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Sensing
What is changing and for whom?
Learn how to identify signals of change and the seeds of feminist futures that have existed throughout time.
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Dreaming
What happens when we give ourselves full permission to desire and to play with our imagination?
Our bodies, emotions, intuition, and creativity can reach beyond what we already think is possible.
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Acknowledging
How do we sit with the plurality of what our futures could look like, including the ones we would never choose?
This practice helps us prepare for, influence, and redirect them.
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Transforming
How do we ground our feminist dreams into present-moment actions?
We can transform current systems of oppression and influence the emergence of feminist futures for all.
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Sharing
How are you applying and adapting the practices of this playbook?
What other practices do you think should integrate? We want to hear from you.
We Will Dream our Feminist Futures
No one can take the power of dreaming away from us.
Feminist Principles
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We recognize how current systems concentrate power unjustly along lines of patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, and heteronormativity. We use our collective agency to build fairer, more balanced power relations during our practices and as a fundamental aspect of the feminist futures we want to see come true.
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We commit to including the specific needs, experiences, and perspectives of women, girls, non-binary individuals, Indigenous peoples, queer communities, and racialised groups from the Global Majority in all their diversity, and to removing the barriers to meaningful and equal participation in envisioning and co-creating feminist futures.
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We honor the diverse ways that cultures or communities perceive, experience, and structure the flow of time and understand its relationship with life. We reclaim time to dream feminist futures.
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We value shared ownership and collaboration over individual expertise, centring communities with lived and embodied experience. Feminist practice teaches us that the most powerful knowledge is built collectively, in spaces where people think, feel, and create together as equals, regardless of their academic background.
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Meaningfully incorporating Global Majority knowledge means moving beyond token inclusion toward truly centering the voices, methods, perspectives, and leadership of those who lived for so long in the margins.
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We recognise that knowledge is embodied, ancestral, intuitive, creative, artistic, and relational, not only data-driven or academic.
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Caring spaces, healing practices, and ethical approaches must be core components of any futures-focused exercise. We design every process with safety, dignity, and well-being at the centre.
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We value and include nature and our more-than-human siblings in our practices of dreaming and co-creating feminist futures.
Our Core Methodology: Futures Thinking and Foresight
The fields of futures thinking and foresight explore how changes in the present unfold into different possible futures, and how people, institutions, and movements can prepare for, influence, respond to, strengthen, or transform them. They can help feminist activists and movements anticipate and be more prepared for multiple future scenarios, navigate uncertainty, and rehearse feminist futures, rather than reacting only to what is happening now.
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Alongside many scholars and practitioners, particularly from the Global Majority, we hold an important critique of futures and foresight methods. Strategic foresight emerged from post-World War II military and corporate strategies, and often carries with it a colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, competitive, technology-reliant, and fear-based paradigm: one that sees the future as something to be won, colonized, or monetized.
If we work uncritically from this paradigm to dream possible futures, we may perpetuate the unequal and oppressive status quo, rather than actively propose meaningful and just transformations.. That is why we have embedded feminist principles in the playbook’s methods, and provided a set of unlearnings and guidelines on how to facilitate these practices in a feminist way.
A Collective Dream Come True
The Dreaming Feminist Futures playbook is itself a collective dream. It emerged from a weaving of imaginaries, desires, longings, discomforts, questions, and experimentations among feminists from diverse backgrounds, geographies, and practices. It builds on the knowledge and wisdom of feminist activists, particularly from the Global Majority, who dreamed feminist futures long before us, many of whose names we will never know.
Developed by the Feminist Dream Space in partnership with Feminist Futures, this playbook is offered as an open, living resource.
We also hope it will help futures and foresight practitioners to embed feminist views more deeply into their work.
Led by: Thays Prado, Feminist Futures, and Leila Hessini, Feminist Dream Space
Edited by: Gitta Zomorodi
Web design & illustration by: Claudia Lopez
In co-creation with:
Angelika Arutyunova, Independent Activist
Annie Hillar, Gender Funders Co-Lab
Chhavi Doonga, Independent Activist
Emma Rhule, Hibiscus Horizons
Lame Olebile, Independent Activist: Weavers Advisory
Margarita Antonio, FIMI
Maria Alejandra Escalante, Climate Activist
Nikita Patodia, Just Associates (JASS)
Shamah Bulangis, Independent Activist
Shumona Goel, Hopper-Dean Foundation
Tiffany Nassiri-Ansari, Hibiscus Horizons
Terry de Vries, Urgent Action Fund - Latin America & the Caribbean