Guest Editors: Ryan McGranaghan, Renee Davis, and Nick Travaglini

In a time of disorientation and raw emotion, the question of flourishing becomes even more urgent—and profoundly collective. We invite scholars, artists, scientists, philosophers, and cultural practitioners to contribute to a special Focus Section in Leonardo, dedicated to exploring flourishing as a dynamic, relational process rooted in ecology, anthropology, and shared inquiry.  In this section we ask how flourishing can be embedded into the very form and process of our work and lives (represented, felt, shared, and enacted).

This call emerges from years of Flourishing Salons and the first Flourishing Summit (which took place in May 2025), a gathering of diverse voices committed to reimagining well-being as participatory, systemic, and evolving–a dynamic, not a state. We seek contributions that explore how flourishing can be embedded into the very form and process of our work and lives (represented, felt, shared, and enacted).

These contributions will be part of creating a long-term conversation about flourishing that emphasizes dialectical engagement, ongoingness, and the pursuit of "great questions."

We welcome contributions in the form of:

• Scholarly essays (up to 5,000 words)
• Dialogues or polyvocal texts
• Practice-based research (including visual, sonic, performative, or computational works)
• Hybrid or experimental formats that treat language and structure as part of the inquiry

Key themes include:  

• What perspectives might open new spaces in the longstanding conversation and living history of flourishing? 
• How can artistic and scientific practices embody ongoingness and collectivity?  
• How do we conceive of interdependence, kinship, and attention as modes of flourishing?  
• What is the role of beautiful questions as generative methods for thinking of flourishing?   
• How might we model dialectical approaches that illustrate flourishing as process over destination?
• In what ways is flourishing scale-dependent? Scale invariant? 
• How might flourishing be measured and how might existing approaches to measurement need to be altered or reimagined to accommodate the complexity of flourishing? 

Flourishing is not a fixed endpoint but a continuous negotiation—an active, collective effort to live well with and for each other, grounded in the moral imagination and personal change that Christiana Figueres describes as essential for systemic change. As Danielle Allen reminds us, “There is no end to history, no state of rest for democracy”—and so too, our conception of flourishing must be an ongoing, participatory process.

Join us in cultivating a plural, reflective movement—one that recognizes the complexity, ambiguity, and beauty of living systems in mutual becoming.

Proposals and Inquiries
Interested authors may submit manuscript proposals or inquiries to editor@leonardo.info.

Manuscript Submissions
For detailed instructions for manuscript and art preparation, visit Information for Journal Authors.

To submit a completed manuscript, upload to Editorial Express.