ABSTRACT Worldmaking is a capacious concept. Far from imagining Empire, sociological treatments of worldmaking are expansive, anchoring the building of new systems, new scaffolds of belonging, and new ways of being in everyday work and collective practices. Worldmaking is a conceptual project and a practical project . This presidential address offers a framework for thinking about worldmaking and its links to both transformation and repair in the context of a prolonged polycrisis. By worldmaking, I mean worlds made and unmade , by people doing ordinary things together, in the face of a temporal and spatial order that limits and constrains. Worldmaking occurs as we bump up against big structure. Worldmaking wards against human vulnerability and despair and sometimes upends harmful systems. Worldmaking is fundamentally grounded in practical labor. It is emergent activity. People are always engaged in building new worlds for themselves, usually worlds within worlds. This address explores the analytical tools for conceptualizing worldmaking on sociological terms, even if ultimately worldmaking, as an analytical intervention, must be both interdisciplinary and community based. This address concludes with consideration of worldmaking and our methods of inquiry.
Amy L. Best (2026) studied this question.