ABSTRACT
Creating collective imaginaries of the future is a central practice in our respective fieldwork with the Fridays For Future movement in Mexico and urban activists in Switzerland. In light of the global pandemic, the knowledge practices that forge these imaginaries, such as concerted action in public space, were interrupted and now stand transformed, allowing us to find commonality between our otherwise distinct fields and our reimagined research trajectories. In this article, we examine how activist practices and ways of producing research knowledge have morphed during the SARS-CoV-2 crisis through the digitalization or hyperlocalization of activism in both contexts. We argue that the interrupted future imaginaries we have observed play a significant role in reshaping the knowledge repertoires (della Porta and Pavan 2017) of both activist and academic endeavours and create possibilities for changed forms of future-making. Through both synchronous and asynchronous collaborative writing practices facilitated by digital tools, we create a joint space in which to reflect, reframe and respond to each other's encounters within our research fields. With this collective exercise, we embrace the 'vulnerabilities, anxieties and uncertainties' (Checker, Davis and Schuller 2014) that are inherent in the entanglements of academia and activist work, so as to reimagine our study of future-oriented activism in times of crisis and beyond.