Ideas and Futures is an interdisciplinary platform that has emerged as a response to the COVID-19 crisis with a focus on re-imagining our societies beyond the pandemic. This website showcases scholarly reflections, art, literary essays and expressions, cultural, social and political commentaries and analyses for international and U.S. based audiences. We believe that literary, artistic, and reflective endeavors are crucial to creating just and vital societies.

We view the pandemic as a societal crisis across the globe. The crisis of public health lies at the intersection of a series of systemic social contradictions and failures, which reverberate across global healthcare systems, politics, economies, and daily life. As such the social repercussions of this pandemic will last far beyond the medical emergency and will shape our societies for decades to come. Noting that there are differential impacts of the current emergency on distinct groups at the national and international levels, we hope that this site will participate in informed, careful and hopeful ways in public discourse and praxis in varied geographical and social contexts.

The COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity in many ways to rethink the notions and paradigms that have come to govern the world, but which we contend are in no way inevitable. This platform seeks to produce, disseminate and engage with ideas on race, migration, citizenship, political futures, public health in the broadest sense in the U.S. and beyond.

The editors are part of the Society and Covid-19 working group and the I&F collaborative whose work and thinking this journal makes available to the public. However, we would also like to invite submissions that are not focused on the pandemic but that engage the journal’s commitments to vibrant and just societies, broadly construed. We particularly value crossover and experimental expression. We have rolled out this website so as to be able to engage the pandemic thoughtfully in a moment of sensationalism and panic. Precisely because of the way that circumstances have affected our thinking, we remain open to reinvention and rethinking our parameters as times change and pass.

Editors:
Sadia Abbas
Raza Rumi

Commissioning Editor:
Shahzia Sikander

Contributing Editors:
R. A. Judy
Faisal Devji

Assistant Editor:
Soili Smith