I offer a philosophical examination and feminist queering of the social imaginaries of the dead - with specific reference to recent public disclosures about death in Ireland's Mother and Baby Homes - by looking at the issue of spectrality through the work of Jacques Derrida and others. What does it mean to respond to the dead, who, though temporarily forgotten, return to haunt us not as remembered human beings but as remnants or remainders? The normative distinctions between past and present; past, present and future; between living and non-living; absence and presence; and self and other are all made indistinct when displaced by a non-linear temporality. What differential is in play with respect to those who are grievable (in Judith Butler's terms) and the others who constitute what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life? The strategy of memorialising the re/discovered dead seems inadequate, and I outline an alternative hauntological ethics, as suggested by Derrida, and ask if there are queer social imaginaries that allow us to live well with the dead not because we give respect, but because death itself has been rethought. I close with some speculations arising from Deleuzian vitalism and Rosi Braidotti's optimistic claim that 'death frees us into life'.

This article collectively discusses creative feminist approaches to ethnographic methods developed in response to challenging social, personal, environmental, and temporal conditions and pressures. Patchwork Ethnography, developed by Gökçe Günel, Saiba Varma and Chika Watanabe, recognises mundane pressures, and works with insights and experiences that emerge not only from doing research, but from what happens around the edges. By rendering the many 'seams' of research visible and valuable, their approach aims to develop creative, kind, and more generous - yet no less robust - research realities. Drawing inspiration from Patchwork Ethnography this article takes a creative approach to the craft of conversation, valuing the fragments, drawing attention to edges and intersections of our collective thinking, research, and experiences and stitching them together into a unique patchworked piece. Throughout, in the spirit of the theme of this special issue, we ask what kinds of ethnographic methods can create new and different futures? What are, or could be, feminist futures of ethnography?

What role do and might feminist methodologies, with their prioritisation of ethical and political questions and interventions, have in creating futures? What kinds of futures are needed? What kinds of feminist imaginations should be cultivated, and how? What world-making practices might feminism (further) develop and/or invent? In the context of war, climate breakdown, pandemics, the resurgence of far-right politics, political upheaval and poverty, this special issue examines the role of feminist methods in creating futures that are desirable and necessary. This introduction to the special issue argues that feminism is especially well-equipped to examine and build new futures and that imagining and making different worlds can be helpfully understood as methods. We sketch out four key themes that we see as significant within the wide, varied and growing literatures on feminist futures and that are particularly important for the contributions gathered together here: .