ABSTRACT
This opening chapter provides an overview of our recent book Sustainability in an Imaginary World. It outlines over a decade of theoretical and practical efforts to reconceive relations between art and sustainability as they typically play out within Western, Modernist contexts. Can we move sustainability beyond parameters of Modernist rationality? Can we shift arts practices into more socially impactful roles while avoiding the disenchanting clutches of instrumental utility? How might we bring these unwieldly elements of our lives together? And once we do, how do we make sense of what we’ve done?
