Abstract:  This introductory piece situates the contributions to the thematic issue “Compassionate Futures for Collective Well‐Being” within contemporary debates on care and compassion. Against the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous, self‐sufficient individual, the articles assembled here foreground vulnerability, interdependence, and mutual responsibility as constitutive features of social life and as foundations for imagining alternative futures. Across diverse geographical, institutional, and more‐than‐human contexts, the contributions examine how care and compassion are enacted through everyday practices, welfare institutions, educational initiatives, participatory research, grassroots networks, urban governance, and multispecies relations. Rather than presenting a celebratory account of compassion, the thematic issue highlights its ambivalent and contested character. Several contributions demonstrate how care can sustain life, foster inclusion, and enable collective agency, while others reveal how discourses of compassion may become entangled with surveillance, exclusion, paternalism, and governance. Together, the articles advance a rich conceptual vocabulary for understanding care and compassion as ethical commitments, political projects, institutional rationalities, and material practices through which social worlds are organized and reproduced. This introduction argues that these contributions collectively point toward the emergence of compassionism as a developing intellectual and political orientation. While not yet a fully stabilized paradigm, compassionism offers a relational alternative to dominant models grounded in competition, individualism, and instrumental rationality and invites an ethico‐onto‐epistemological reorientation of scholarship and social action. The thematic issue thus contributes to ongoing efforts to rethink the conditions of collective well‐being and to explore the possibilities—and limits—of compassionate futures in an era marked by multiple social, ecological, and political crises.

Keywords:  care research; compassionate futures; compassionism

Published:   7 October 2026

Issue:   Vol 14 (2026): Compassionate Futures for Collective Well-Being