This course focuses on imagination as a mode of inquiry and as a site of political creativity. We will build on long standing work on the sensorium to expand conceptions of the political, providing students with the opportunity to generate new imaginative possibilities. Approaches include building a research practice that involves walking, archiving, mapping, multimedia and sensory-oriented fieldwork, speculative storytelling, and practicing material synaesthesia. Grounded in a series of site engagements, the course will foreground sensorial literacies and methods of ‘observation’ that include but go beyond the visual, developing mimetic capacities and embodied modes of understanding and relating. We center collaboration and cooperation as essential modes of inquiry and practice. Possible sites range from a sewer grate to local waterways and sidewalk trees to botanical gardens. We will look to living systems asking what the natural world can teach us about mutual aid, recovery, and restoration, while emphasizing traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), queer and non-binary perspectives, and multi-species cosmopolitics. We will work collectively to develop alternative visions and approaches that challenge the myths, metaphors, practices, and narratives that make it difficult to shape the world and our futures in ways that center justice. The class is co-taught by faculty from across the university–Barbara Adams, Victoria Hattam, and Jane Pirone – each of whom has rather different but overlapping interests and backgrounds. We come together to create an experimental learning space from which we will imagine alternate presents and future possibilities. *This seminar will be taught in co-ordination with Anthro section – Political Imagination Parsons section – collab: Political Imagination in a coordinated time slot.