The Conceivable Future

Meghan Kallman is an environmental activist. She has taught college in the Rhode Island state prison, and was elected to the city council in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where she served two terms before winning a seat in the Rhode Island State Senate in 2020, a position she still holds. Meghan is on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in the graduate School for Global Inclusion and Social Development. As a sociologist and researcher, she has published many peer-reviewed research articles, as well as two books, The Third Sector: Community Organizations , NGOs, and Nonprofits, and The Death of Idealism: Development and Anti-Politics in the Peace Corps. Alongside colleague Stephanie Malin, she recently published Building Something Better: Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change. Josephine Ferorelli is a writer, visual artist, and yoga instructor, and a longtime Chicago resident. After participating in Occupy Wall Street in 2011 Josephine began to write and edit climate coverage for Occupy.com. She collaborated with photographer Danny Lyon on a book called Burn Zone (2016), and in 2016 she wrote an account of her own arrest, with forty other activists, outside a BP oil refinery in Whiting, Indiana. Josephine also writes about the climate crisis from a yogic and buddhist perspective on her blog, Grandgather.com. In 2014, Meghan and Josephine co-founded the organization called Conceivable Future. Conceivable Future’s work has appeared in media outlets including The Atlantic, CBC, BBC, The Independent, The Nation, Telemundo, USA Today, The Irish Times, Vice, Salon, Yahoo News, Vox, The Years Project, WNYC, The Huffington Post, NBC News, NPR, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times. Meghan and Josephine contributed an essay in the collection Motherhood In Precarious Times (2018).