This proposal is the result of the International Seminar-Workshop · Imagining Alternative Futures from the Global South: Contributions from the Social Sciences of Latin America for the Future.

— o —

The following text explains how the seminar-workshop was carried out:

Imagining Alternative Futures from the Global South: Contributions from the Social Sciences of Latin America for the Future

We present this academic activity organized in 2025 jointly by the Chair of the History of American and Argentine Political and Social Ideas (FFyL-UNCuyo), the Social Sciences and Health Program of FLACSO – Argentina, and the Chair of Problems of Historical Knowledge (UNSur). It included participants from various parts of the world, mainly Latin America and the Caribbean.

It was not a science fiction exercise nor a technological projection detached from reality. It was, above all, a historical act. From the perspective of the History of Ideas, futures are not mere linear anticipations of the present, but cultural constructions shaped by power struggles, horizons of expectation, reinterpretations of the past, and intellectual traditions. To think about 2084 from the Global South means critically questioning the hegemonic imaginaries that often define what progress and development are, as well as which ways of life are considered desirable. It means opening the possibility of imagining alternatives rooted in our own historical experiences.

Latin America and the Caribbean have been, since their modern constitution, territories intensely projected toward the future. Not only as promise or subordinated periphery, but also as spaces of transformative imagination. The Latin American intellectual tradition has reflected this. Since the 19th century, thinkers and intellectuals of the region dared to conceive different realities, to question structural dependencies, and to project emancipatory horizons. Their ideas were not mere diagnoses of their time, but interventions in history: attempts to influence “Our America.”

Recovering those voices today — from José Martí to José Carlos Mariátegui, or more recently Rigoberta Menchú — does not mean returning to the past as a nostalgic exercise, but activating a genealogy of political and cultural imagination that continues to challenge us. Many intellectuals understood that to think about Latin America was to imagine it differently: autonomous, integrated, socially just, culturally affirmed. In this sense, imagining 2084 does not inaugurate a new practice, but inscribes itself in a regional tradition of producing possible futures.

The international course aimed precisely to activate that tradition. Through exercises of imaginary travel to 2084, the production of narratives, drawings, and conceptual proposals, along with spaces for critical dialogue, participants explored possible scenarios for our societies. The imaginations generated addressed issues related to technology, daily life, the environment, politics, social bonds, ways of inhabiting territory, among other topics. Each production was understood not as prediction, but as a question: what fears, desires, and tensions of the present are projected into that imagined 2084?

The activities were not limited to individual creation. Collective discussion, interdisciplinary exchange, and the connection between future scenarios and historical debates that have shaped the region — dependency, integration, modernity, inequality, cultural identity — were promoted. In this way, the prospective exercise also became a tool to better understand the present.

The purpose of this experience was to strengthen a situated literacy of futures: a critical capacity to recognize that narratives about tomorrow influence decisions made today. Imagining from the Global South means disputing meanings, amplifying voices, and building horizons that do not automatically reproduce external models. The productions incorporated into the Museum of Imagined Futures are part of that collective archive where the future ceases to be an imposed destiny and becomes a field of shared creation.

Imagining 2084 from Latin America and the Caribbean is, ultimately, an act of historical responsibility. It means recognizing that futures are not given, but constructed; that ideas matter; and that our region has been, and can continue to be, a fertile space for thinking and creating possible worlds.

For this reason, we present here the final results of the work of the commissions formed during the course, composed of a heterogeneous group both in disciplinary training and geographical location. That diversity — far from fragmenting the experience — enriched the debate, broadened perspectives, and allowed local realities to be contrasted with shared problems at regional and global scales. The final works presented are propositional, original, and critically grounded; they do not offer closed answers, but argued scenarios that articulate historical memory, diagnosis of the present, and political imagination. They express the conviction that permeated the entire experience: that imagining the future is also a way of exercising intellectual citizenship and collectively assuming the task of thinking — and disputing — the horizons of tomorrow.

Authors: Lic. Renzo Molini, Dr. Walter Camargo