Alize Arıcan
ABSTRACT Mustafa Abi, a Kurdish resident and shopkeeper in Istanbul's Tarlabaşı neighborhood, opened his shop next to a state‐led urban transformation project that seeks to displace him and his neighbors, right when the construction started and when rumors of its expansion were swirling. When asked why, he replied, “I knew there was something here,” sensing potential futures diverging from those the urban transformation project proposed. Following that “something,” I ask: What propels marginalized people like Mustafa Abi to stay with future possibilities in places that threaten to displace them? The answer lies in what I call cultivating potentialities : future‐making, not despite, but through indeterminacy, steeped in structural inequalities. Cultivating potentialities offers a lens into what marginalized people do with potentialities, moving beyond conceptions that frame potentiality as strategic, haphazard, or out of reach for them. Instead, racialized and marginalized people embrace that the futures they seek may or may not be realized, to whatever extent, placing potentiality somewhere between actualization and non‐actualization in practice. Unburdened by fixed goals, cultivating potentialities is thus open‐ended yet not boundless, still intimately shaped by the unequal ground in which cultivations take root.