CALL FOR PAPERS
Threads of Hope: Ancestral Knowledge and Feminist Futures
The colours, patterns, and symbols [of embroidery]aren’t just aesthetic. They’re stitched with hope and protection. – Kelly Kornet Weber
The Journal of Futures Studies (JFS) invites submissions for a Symposium on the theme “Threads of Hope: Ancestral Knowledge and Feminist Futures.” This issue emerges from a deeply reflective online gathering of our Futures Community of Practice, held on International Vyshyvanka Day, 15 May 2025 and led by foresight practitioner Kelly Kornet Weber. The session traced a path through ancestral memory, Ukrainian embroidery (Vyshyvka), and embodied foresight practice – raising potent questions about ancestral knowledge passed through art and craft, care, and how we might literally stitch preferred futures into being.
Drawing on this event (recording: JFSCOP YouTube; post-event write-up: JFSCOP Substack), we invite scholars, artists, practitioners, and activists to explore the intersections of embroidery, care, memory, and futures thinking. In the seminar, participants reflected on intergenerational transmission, feminist resistance, the magic of craft, and the cross-cultural resonances of textile arts. We now open the thread further – inviting contributions that stretch across geographies, generations, and genres.
This Symposium is the second in the Feminist Futures series. Last year, we held the highly successful Hesitant Feminist’s Guide to the Future Symposium, which resulted in contributions from thirty authors, published as articles and essays in the Journal of Futures Studies, or texts in JFS Perspectives. The 2025 Symposium articles and essays are available here: Symposium Issue, and Perspectives. The initial monograph that gave rise to the Symposium is available here: Hesitant Feminist’s Guide to the Future.
The monograph defined Feminist Futures as visions of gender equity, moving away from patriarchal pasts and presents. In line with feminist epistemology, the preferred vision for the future includes other equitable social arrangements, where all are given equal opportunities, irrespective of their ethnicity, class, (dis)ability, sexual orientation, and other forms of identity. Feminist futures are based on a vision and “an attempt to create a truly inclusive world that celebrates diversity and sees it as a source of enrichment rather than [superiority/] inferiority” (Audre Lorde, paraphrased in Milojević, 2025, p. 46).
The Threads of Hope Symposium further seeks to explore how practices often dismissed as inferior – e.g., domestic or decorative arts such as women’s textile and embroidery work – can serve as rich speculative, strategic, and narrative tools for imagining alternative futures. It invites conversations that are not only academic, but also tender, communal, and embodied.
We hope this Symposium will act as a communal cloth – stitched from voices across traditions, geographies, and generations. At a time when many futures feel frayed or uncertain, may this be a space to recover the sacred, reimagine the possible, and remember how to care.
Let’s make something beautiful, together. 🧵✨
🔍 KEY THEMES AND GUIDING QUESTIONS
We welcome submissions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:
Crafting as Worldbuilding
How can embroidery, quilting, weaving, and other textile arts function as tools for speculative design or preferred futures? How do these practices hold, transmit, or challenge cultural visions of the future?
Temporal Layering and Spiral Time
In what ways do ancestral practices challenge linear temporalities? What does spiral or cyclical time look like in your community’s futures?
Feminist and Decolonial Futures
How do women’s and gendered crafts reframe the narrative of foresight? What risks emerge when cultural revival is entangled with nationalism or patriarchy?
Embodied and Experiential Futures
How do embodied, intuitive, or emotional ways of knowing inform foresight? What role do frameworks like Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) play in honouring cultural specificity?
Memory, Loss, and Intergenerational Hope
How can we preserve what is fragmenting – language, place, memory – through acts of craft? What might it mean to stitch futures forward for descendants we’ll never meet?
Cross-Cultural Craft Dialogues
What parallels or resonances exist between global craft traditions? What might emerge from a conversation between Vyshyvanka and other Eastern European traditions? Or between these and African American quilting? Or between Indigenous beading and Southeast Asian weaving?
Speculative Garments and Future Artefacts
What might it look like to stitch alternative or shadow futures into garments? Can material culture reflect the plurality of possible futures?
Care as Methodology
How does the act of stitching – slow, intentional, intimate – invite a different kind of inquiry? What futures are possible when care is centered as a foresight practice?
TYPES OF CONTRIBUTIONS
We welcome a wide variety of submissions that reflect the spirit of interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and speculative inquiry, including:
- Academic articles and essays
- Visual essays or photographic explorations of textile work
- Personal narratives or reflections grounded in memory and foresight
- Interviews or dialogues with craft practitioners and foresight thinkers
- Creative nonfiction, speculative fiction, or future imaginaries
- Ethnographic accounts of textile-based futures work
- Multimodal and hybrid formats (e.g., textile + text; sound + stitching; videos and other digital outputs)
We are especially interested in collaborative works, submissions from Indigenous and diasporic voices, and projects that blend theory with practice.
📅 SUBMISSION TIMELINE
- Extended Abstract/Proposal Due: 1 August 2025, email to tkufutures@gmail.com
- Full Submission Due: 1 November 2025
- Peer Review Period: November–December 2025 and January 2026
- Publication Target: 8 March 2026
📌 SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Symposium respondents are invited to submit essays or articles ranging from 2,500 to 8,000 words in length (including references). These contributions will be peer-reviewed, and accepted pieces will be published in the Journal of Futures Studies. Additionally, a session in the JFS Community of Practice is planned for 8 March 2026.
Visual and hybrid works should include high-resolution images and a written contextualization (500–1,000 words).
All submissions should be sent via:
🔗 https://ojs.jfsdigital.org/index.php/jfs/about/submissions
Please follow the Journal of Futures Studies formatting guidelines:
🔗 https://jfsdigital.org/invitation-to-authors/
