South Asian Futures Lab
The South Asian Futures Lab is an ongoing space for inquiry and experimentation that informs our practice. It brings together our research, writing, and field-based exploration to work through how futures are imagined, shaped, and rehearsed from within the region. Our lab stems from a simple but urgent condition. Many of the systems shaping everyday life are becoming more volatile, more unequal, and more tightly coupled. As these pressures intensify, they narrow the range of futures that remain possible.
The Lab works with this constraint directly. Rather than treating futures as distant outcomes, it focuses on the conditions that allow multiple pathways to remain open. This includes how people adapt, how systems reorganise, and how new forms of practice emerge within uncertainty.
Across South Asia, these dynamics are already visible. Futures are being negotiated in real time through everyday decisions, informal systems, and collective responses. The Lab stays close to these realities, working through them as sites of learning, tension, and possibility. This includes making visible forms of knowledge, practice, and experience that are often overlooked or excluded in dominant ways of understanding systems and futures.
Futures in Progress: South Asian Futures Framework is an evolving set of principles for working with futures from within the region. It brings together research, field practice, and cultural insight to engage with how futures are imagined, shaped, and lived across South Asia’s diverse contexts. It is grounded in the recognition that the region is not singular, but composed of overlapping realities shaped by relationships between people, land, infrastructure, and power. The framework works with these conditions rather than abstracting away from them.
South Asian Futures Framework
Riyāz (ریاض)
Rīn (ऋण)
Multispecies
Co-Existence
Multispecies Co-Existence is an ongoing line of inquiry into how futures are shaped across human and non-human life in South Asia. It begins from the recognition that ecological breakdown is already reorganising relationships between species, land, and infrastructure.
The work engages with how these relationships are understood, practiced, and negotiated in everyday contexts, across rivers, agricultural systems, forests, and urban environments. It draws from field research, cultural practices, and situated knowledge to examine how coexistence is sustained or reconfigured under changing conditions. This work focuses on how different forms of life participate in shaping the systems we depend on.
Jīvṛut (જીવૃત)
River is Relative
This is an ongoing inquiry into imagination infrastructure from within South Asia.
Building on work by Cassie Robinson, Keri Facer, and others, we approach imagination infrastructure here as a question of continuity and generation: what allows collective imagination to persist, accumulate, generate new possibilities, and move forward on its own terms?
This means paying attention to where imagination already lives, in seasonal knowledge, oral traditions, shared practices, inherited forms of adaptation, and the informal systems through which people continue to work through uncertainty. It also means asking what allows new forms of imagination to emerge from within these conditions, rather than being introduced from outside or redirected too early.
Imagination Infrastructure in South Asia
At Lagori, counter mapping is a practice of redistributing power and reimagining relationships to place, each other and bodies. Maps are as much about what they leave out, as they include. As tools of authority and power, counter mapping pushes back by interrogating who gets to define boundaries, what is recognised as knowledge-worthy and thereby creating space for alternate ways of knowing and being.
In our practice, when done in participation with communities, it allows us to explore not only relationship with place and space, but language, power dynamics, resource flows and much more . As a form of research and strategy, it opens new ways of seeing, shifts narratives and enables imagination of alternate futures.
Counter Mapping
Words Another Worlds
Teh (تہ) – Illegible by Design
Notes From In Between
Notes From In Between is where we think through our work in real time. It holds the fragments, questions, and tensions that emerge as we move across research, collaborations, and ongoing projects. Often, this is where things are still unclear. What begins in the field often continues here. A method becomes a question. A framework starts to shift. Something we thought we understood begins to come undone. We use this space to stay with that movement, rather than rushing to resolve it.
Our writing is part of the practice. It helps us make sense of what we are encountering, and at times, opens up new directions, ways of working, or collaborations. At other times, it remains unfinished.
We keep this space open. It changes as the work changes.
