Jericho Brown's The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, includes four duplexes, a poetic form of Brown's own invention that combines the sonnet and the blues. Made of fourteen lines separated into seven couplets, the duplex is a complex structure comprised of sets of indents and repeated lines. Brown's use of disparate source forms to create a new form altogether challenges the supremacy of a singular, white American literary tradition, putting it into conversation with other traditions in order to critique its historically racist and heterosexist boundaries. As he does so, Brown works not to abolish "the tradition" or canon, but to expand it beyond reductive ideas of who and what is allowed into this historically exclusive space. The complexity of Brown's formal project mirrors the nuanced and critical hope the duplex form expresses and evokes in readers; in contrast to queer theory's long focus on negativity, Brown's duplexes align themselves with the work of José Muñoz and Mari Ruti, who assert that hope is equally as important as negativity, as they hold the positive and negative together in both form and content. The duplex seeks to expand emotional experience as well as the canon, ultimately attempting to change the way readers feel and act.

Our current times are marked by the unprecedented challenges of environmental and social crisis. Transformative changes need to take place and in this study, we explore the role of Gotlandic citizens engaged in sustainability in creating a sustainable future. We follow a recent scholarship focusing on the power of imagination in the context of shaping sustainable futures. Through the theory lens of spaces, we map Gotlandic citizens’ individual experiences of context where they engage with sustainability in different forms of rational and imaginative reflection, alone or together. We conduct qualitative interviews to investigate existing spaces combined with action research where we create a new space of shared imagination in the form of a workshop. An in-depth understanding is gained of the reactions and emotions that our study participants express towards all of these spaces. Going beyond the (k)now, both in the meaning of going beyond traditional forms of knowledge but also in the sense of going into an uncertain future, allowed us to investigate the role of arts-based imagination in the context of an island community. Our findings suggest that spaces for practicing imagination are lacking, but are highly valued when experienced. They provide an alert hopefulness and a gentle way for ordinary citizens to engage with the complex topic of sustainable futures. Another key result of our study is that communities are important spaces where collective visions can grow.