Afrofuturism is often associated with science fiction, visual art, music, and literature. From the work of Octavia Butler to the imaginative worlds of Black speculative storytelling, it offers a way to see Black life beyond the boundaries imposed by the present.
In a recent CHOIR Conversation, Dr. Monique Inez Liston, founder and chief strategist of UBUNTU Research and Evaluation, challenged us to move beyond the blueprints we have inherited and begin experimenting with futures we have not yet experienced.
"I think that Afrofuturism is the audacious belief that Black people live in the future unencumbered by racism."
That belief is audacious because so much of our political and economic life assumes that Black people must continue to survive within systems shaped by anti-Blackness. Even reform efforts can take those conditions for granted, asking how to make harmful institutions more tolerable rather than questioning why they should continue to exist in their current form.
Afrofuturism asks us to begin somewhere else. What would a world without anti-Blackness actually require? How would we organize our institutions differently? What might become possible in our communities if racial oppression were no longer treated as inevitable?
These questions change the work of strategy. Rather than limiting our goals to what current systems are willing to accommodate, we can begin evaluating our decisions against the future we believe people deserve.
Monique's understanding of Afrofuturism is also deeply connected to ancestry. She spoke about the influence of her parents, grandparents, and the intellectual ancestors whose teachings continue to shape her work. The future they imagined helped make her present possible, even when they did not live to experience it themselves.
We inherit unfinished work, along with the wisdom and imagination of those who came before us. Our responsibility is to continue learning from that inheritance without assuming that the futures our ancestors imagined are the furthest we can go.
Play as Strategy
Throughout 2026, nINA Collective has been exploring what it means to rebuild after the fire. One question has become especially important: How do we rebuild without reproducing the conditions we are trying to transform?
Among Dr Liston's most compelling invitations was a call to bring play to the rebuilding project we are undertaking.
In her organization's approach to Afrofuturist evaluation, play is a deliberate practice that makes experimentation and collective learning possible. When people play, they test ideas and learn through experience. They discover possibilities they may not have considered through discussion alone.
Perhaps most importantly, play changes our relationship to failure.
"When we eliminate play, you try and you fail, we open that door for punishment."
Consider how often organizational culture reinforces this dynamic. People hesitate to propose unfamiliar ideas because they may be judged for getting something wrong. Teams invest enormous energy in producing polished plans before they have had opportunities to experiment. Leaders feel pressure to demonstrate certainty even when the challenges they face have no established solution.
For organizations committed to changing systems, the implications are significant. What might happen if we gave teams more permission to test ideas before formalizing plans? What if community members could experiment with solutions rather than simply respond to proposals developed by professionals? What would change if we treated early failure as information instead of evidence that someone had done something wrong?
A culture that supports experimentation requires trust. People need room to be curious without fear that every imperfect attempt will become a measure of their competence.
If we want to build liberatory institutions, the process of creating them must make room for that kind of humanity.
Grieving the Futures We Expected
Radical imagination can be difficult to access when the present feels especially painful.
The last several years have brought repeated reminders of how deeply entrenched oppressive systems remain. For people who have spent decades working toward social transformation, there can be a particular exhaustion in witnessing familiar harms continue, often in new forms.
During the conversation, ananda reflected on having felt more hopeful about the future a decade ago than they do today.
Dr Liston responded by naming something that often goes unrecognized in organizing and social change work: grief for the lives and futures we expected to have.
We grieve people we have lost, but we also grieve possibilities. We may grieve the belief that our communities would be safer by now, that certain struggles would have been resolved, or that the work of previous generations would have carried us further.
Monique described developing a grief ecology, bringing together abolition, Afrofuturism, and the ongoing experience of living in a world that has not yet become what we believe it could be.
There is something powerful in acknowledging that grief and political imagination are connected. We can believe liberation is possible while mourning the fact that we have not yet reached it.
Grief can also tell us something about what we value. The futures we mourn reveal what we have hoped for, what we believe people deserve, and what remains unfinished.
For people engaged in community work, this suggests that grief deserves space within our organizational practices. Without that space, we risk carrying unacknowledged grief into the very strategies and relationships we hope will move us toward liberation.
Practicing Liberation Before We Arrive
Perhaps the most challenging implication of radical imagination is that we cannot reserve liberation for some distant future. We need to we begin practicing it now.
Monique offered a revealing example from her own organization.
After ten years of working for herself, she recognized that she was still scheduling her first meetings at 9 a.m., following the same conventional work schedule she might have maintained within an institution. Even after creating an organization grounded in different values, some of the expectations of capitalist work culture remained embedded in her daily practice.
Other choices had been easier to change.
At UBUNTU Research and Evaluation, the office closes for Black August, creating time to commemorate resistance, acknowledge the unfinished work of liberation, and deepen the organization's political practice.
That decision challenges the assumption that productivity and constant availability should determine how we organize our time. It also demonstrates that we don't always have to wait for large-scale structural transformation to begin practicing elements of liberation.
Organizations make decisions every day about how people spend their time, how resources are distributed, and whose knowledge is valued. These decisions offer opportunities to examine whether our practices reflect the future we claim to want.
Individual and organizational choices cannot eliminate structural oppression on their own. But Monique's examples challenge us to recognize where oppressive systems have shaped our habits so thoroughly that we have stopped seeing them as choices.
The challenge is learning to recognize those choices, particularly the ones we have been taught are simply the way things work.
Making Room for Futures Beyond Our Own Imagination
Toward the end of the conversation, Monique offered a striking vision of what success might look like for future generations.
She imagined a young person encountering her work years from now and finding it limited, perhaps even surprisingly unliberatory, because their own experience of freedom had moved so far beyond what she could imagine today.
There is humility in that aspiration.
We will not have every answer. Some of our most radical ideas may eventually become inadequate. The young people who inherit our work will encounter possibilities we cannot yet recognize, just as we have inherited possibilities that previous generations struggled to imagine.
Our responsibility is to build in ways that allow them to go further.
That requires us to resist the temptation to make our current knowledge the final authority. It requires relationships across generations, a willingness to learn from people whose experiences differ from our own, and institutions capable of changing as our understanding of liberation expands.
As we continue exploring what it means to rebuild after the fire, this may be one of the most important commitments we can make.
We can honor what came before without recreating it. We can acknowledge grief without surrendering our imagination. We can experiment with new ways of working, recognizing that the process will be unfinished and sometimes uncomfortable.
And we can begin to practice elements of the future we want, even while living within systems we are working to transform.
Continue the Conversation With Us
At nINA Collective, we believe that imagining another way is inseparable from practicing it together. Our CHOIR Conversations create space to explore the ideas, relationships, and everyday choices that shape the futures we are building.
If you are looking for a community where people are willing to question familiar assumptions, learn through experimentation, and support one another in the ongoing work of transformation, we invite you to join our Community of Practice.
Each month, we gather to learn from one another and explore what becomes possible when we put our shared values into practice. We would love to have you in the conversation.