Things We Imagined: Essays and Visuals on Black Futurity and Academic Life is multi-modal exploration of Black college and university professors and the futures they imagine for themselves. Through artistic portraits, essays, personal reflections, poetry, and documentary interviews, this volume broadens the focus of Black life-making in the academy beyond the limitations of racism and toward the possibility of more liberatory futures. Rather than asking how Black faculty endure inequitable institutions, Things We Imagined asks what futures they long to create and what higher education might become if those imagined futures were taken seriously. Blending together years of research and artistic practice, this chronicle offers a hopeful vision of the “not yet” for higher education and Black faculty futures as otherwise.

Charles H.F. Davis III, Ph.D. is a third-generation educator committed to the lives, love, and liberation of everyday Black people. Dr. Davis is especially concerned with understanding the agentic role of racially minoritized people in resisting systemic oppression. This includes examining the racialized processes and practices of educational world-making by which higher education can be radically reimagined as a life-affirming institution. He is co-principal investigator of Imagined Futures, a multimodal project which uses speculative approaches and visual methods to understand and promote liberatory visions of Black life-making within and beyond the academy.

Candace N. Hall, Ed.D. seeks to challenge conventional perspectives, offering new ways to understand the possibility of joy and fostering community among Black faculty in the academy. In addition to her written scholarship, Dr. Hall’s creative activities include producing clusterluck, an award-winning documentary film that highlights the experiences of a group of Black faculty within a department at a historically white institution; and as co-principal investigator of Imagined Futures,  a multimodal project which uses speculative approaches and visual methods to understand and promote liberatory visions of Black life-making within and beyond the academy.