How Do We Weave the Future? Weaving as an Epistemic Praxis in Majuli Island, India

Climate research has frequently recognised a crisis of imagination. This paper addresses this crisis by treating everyday practices as epistemic practices in their own right, by focusing on weaving in Sumoimari, Majuli Island, India. By engaging with futures studies and Indigenous methodologies scholarship, it showcases how futures can be imagined and materially represented. Particularly, it asks how socioecological futures are materially produced through situated practices of making, and what happens when such practices are understood as forms of knowledge. The paper draws on year‐long ethnographic fieldwork in Sumoimari village (and beyond) in Majuli Island in Assam, India, a riverine landscape shaped by erosion, flooding and ongoing infrastructural transformation. By focusing on Sumoimari, it explores weaving among Mising communities as a space and everyday practice through which environmental and social imagination are actively materialised. The analysis focuses on the collaborative weaving of an Erkok, a traditional Mising scarf, which emerged as a participant‐led activity for expressing temporal changes in their village. The paper argues that weaving functions not as an innovative and creative research method but as an already‐existing epistemic practice through which memory and imagination are materially entangled. It shows how participants use motifs, colour, creativity and skills to articulate imagined futures shaped by infrastructure while also challenging linear and dominant narratives of Majuli's inevitable submergence. The paper concludes that everyday material practices can operate as situated forms of future‐making which require a rethinking of how knowledge is produced and exchanged within research.