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Staying with the Unknown: Paradox, Uncertainty, and the Praxis of Hope

Paradox emerges where thick presents press against weak futures, where common urgencies collide with the dispersion of uncommon imaginaries. Temporalities entangle and scales clash, while futures oscillate between foreclosure and speculation. Within this context, paradox becomes the prevailing atmosphere in which our anticipatory practices unfold. To engage with paradox is not to resolve it, but to inhabit it, to hold together dissonant logics and unstable boundaries, and to design with, rather than against, their tensions.

Dualities such as global/local, present/future, human/nonhuman, and individual/system are no longer sufficient coordinates for thought. They reveal the symptomatic reductions of epistemologies that render the complex manageable through separation. Against such binarism, forms of anticipation grounded in emergence, relationality, and heterogeneity begin to take shape. Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, Vattimo, and Haraway, this work calls for interpretive pluralism, for weak thought, and for a deepened sensitivity to the ambiguities that shape knowledge, power, and care.

Uncertainty within this framing is not an obstacle to overcome but the very condition of anticipatory reasoning. Rather than closing gaps through predictive mastery, we are invited to dwell within them, to hold space for untranslatability, friction, and the provisional. This orientation shifts anticipation from a technical-rational exercise to an ethical and aesthetic engagement with the not-yet. Inspired by feminist technoscience, Indigenous cosmologies, and decolonial methodologies, this approach foregrounds translation, problematization, and dialogic invention as central tools for futures-making.

Yet staying with the unknown is an affective and ontological stance. Against the backdrop of defuturing logics, hope re-emerges not as naïve optimism, but as disciplined, projectual imagination. Building on Tomás Maldonado’s “speranza progettuale,” Ernst Bloch’s anticipatory consciousness, and Tony Fry’s redirective practice, we reclaim hope as an active force: a way to read potentiality within the cracks of the present, and to orient design toward the creation of otherwise worlds. Hope, in this sense, becomes the connective tissue between paradox and uncertainty, a speculative ethics for engaging futures beyond control.

In this context, anticipation demands a rethinking of disciplinary and methodological boundaries. It calls for contributions that examine the ontological, epistemological, and temporal foundations of anticipatory thought, while inventing grammars, scales, and formats that can hold complexity without flattening it. It positions anticipation as a critical, situated, and collective endeavor, one that foregrounds alternative ways of knowing, relating, and imagining, and that practices futures not as inevitabilities, but as contested and constructed terrains of possibility.

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