COVID-19 has loosened neoliberalism’s hegemonic grip on the future. Amid the enormous suffering experienced internationally, there is much discussion of how to ‘Build Back Better’, and hope for a more caring, just and sustainable world. But competing futures are being imagined and planned. Hope is never politically neutral, and the content of collective hope is a key site of political struggle. This is partly a question of space: who has the literal and discursive space in which to develop visions of the future? The following article considers the role that cultural studies can play in this struggle. ‘Conjunctural analysis’ has a key task, making visible the competing futures contained within the present. But cultural studies should go further: combining conjunctural analysis with methods drawn from a range of scholarly and activist traditions – including critical pedagogy, devised theatre and the interdisciplinary field of futures studies – that deliberately create spaces for imagining new futures.

COVID-19放宽了新自由主义对未来的霸权控制。在国际上遭受的巨大苦难中，关于如何“更好地重建”的讨论很多，并希望建立一个更贴心，公正和可持续的世界。但是，正在想象和计划竞争的未来。希望永远不会在政治上中立，集体希望的内容是政治斗争的关键场所。这在一定程度上是一个空间问题：谁拥有在字面上和话语空间中发展未来愿景的空间？下一篇文章考虑了文化研究在这场斗争中可以发挥的作用。“结语分析”的关键任务是使当前包含的竞争性未来可见。但是文化研究应该走得更远：