What Future Do We Want Now?
A Collaborative Call to Future-Making with The Gordon Institute
is an initiative of the Gordon Institute for Advanced Study (GIAS), seeded by a question that the 12th United States Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, posed during the March 13, 2026 taping of season 1, episode 3 for the Politics of Possibility Series:
Where is our Project 2029?
Compelled by this question, The Gordon Institute faculty and research affiliates were invited to engage the following questions:
What are we building and imagining next?
How might we enact these possibilities?
What transformations do we envision?
Rather than remain tethered to the logics of erasure and retrenchment, these contributing Gordon Institute affiliates-- as inheritors of a world in progress, and as inventors of the world to come– were invited to join The Politics of Possibility mission in collectively dreaming, imagining, and future-making. This collection is part of that work.
This is part of and not “the product” because this collaborative call is an invitation, an opening, a call and response push to the field to join in this futuring that centers equity and the lives of the uprooted and the dispossessed, the socially precarious and subjected.
We hope you will join us as we take up this collective charge and provocation by critically engaging and pursuing -
What Future Do We Want Now?
Edited by
Ezekiel Dixon-Román
Director, The Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Teachers College, Columbia University
Felicia Mensah
The Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Teachers College, Columbia University
Marcus Croom
Assistant Professor in the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington
Essays
Toward a Human Future-For Education
Edmund W. Gordon
Founding Director, The Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Teachers College, Columbia University
Reimagining Education While Centering Black Culture: Hip-Hop as a Pathway to Black Advancement
Edmund Adjapong
Director, Hip-Hop Culture, Equity, and Excellence Academy
Associate Professor of Educational Studies, Seton Hall University
What Is Equity Within Empire? On Otherwise Publics of Learning
Arshad Imtiaz Ali
Associate Professor, Education and Affiliate Faculty, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Resisting Eugenical Technologies of Enclosure: Towards Intelligence as a Commons
Alicia Chatterjee
Postdoctoral Fellow, The Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Teachers College, Columbia University
Beyond Dismantling: Reimagining the U.S. Department of Education as Democratic Infrastructure
Jonathan Collins
Executive Director of the Center for Educational Equity, Teachers College, Columbia University
Pedal to the Medal: Accelerating into the Past Due, Post-White Turn
Marcus Croom
Assistant Professor in the School of Education and Affiliate Faculty in African
American and African Diaspora Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
A Demos That Dreams: Education, Machine Intelligence, and the Labor of Worlds Otherwise
Ezekiel Dixon-Román
Director, The Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Teachers College, Columbia University
The Criminal University or a Pluriversity of Criminals
Dani Friedrich
Professor of Curriculum, Teachers College, Columbia University
Culturally Responsive School Leadership and Civic Engagement
Mark Anthony Gooden
Christian Johnson Endeavor Professor in Education Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University
Moving from Good Teaching to Systemically Improved Teacher Education Programs
Felicia Mensah
Professor of Science Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Senior Associate Director of Research in the Edmund W. Gordon Institute of Advanced Study at Teachers College, Columbia University
The Future Our Children Deserve
Sonali Rajan
Professor of Health Promotion and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Co-Director, Columbia Center for Injury Science and Prevention
Collaboration for Lenape Futurity in a Settler Colonial City that Never Sleeps
Rachel Talbert
Research Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Reimagining Education Summer Institute and Advanced Certificate Program, Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study, Teachers College, Columbia University
Questions? Email gordoninstitute@tc.columbia.edu