Cultivating the futures imaginary: Imaginative methods and
futures literacies
1 pm Mountain time, Wednesdays, May 1, 15, 22, 29
Presenter
Rachel Horst is literacy scholar and educator who recently
completed her doctoral degree from the Department of Language and Literacy
Education at The University of British Columbia. Her research focusses upon
creative and arts-based digital literacies and future literacies pedagogies as
conceptualized through a posthuman ontology of difference. Her work
investigates the generative confluence of digital creation,
writing-as-becoming, and creative futures for cultivating the imaginary.
Informed by decolonial discourse, Rachel’s research praxis takes up creative
methods that seek to map theoretically enriched pathways between literacies
scholarship, systems thinking, and future literacies pedagogy. Rachel currently
lives with her family in xwilkway (Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia). Before
pursuing her doctoral degree she was a secondary school teacher, working in the
remote Indigenous community of Bella Bella, BC, and at the alternative school
on the traditional territory of the Shishalh peoples on the Sunshine Coast, BC.
Her teaching practice continues to be informed by her work with youth outside
of mainstream contexts, exploring creative technologies for sharing alternative
stories of selves and futures in and for troubled times.
Session #1: Futures literacies
In this 60-minute session, participants will be introduced to
the interdisciplinary concept of futures literacies along with different
philosophical approaches to thinking and modeling complex futures in and for
troubled times. We will explore the ways that futures imaginaries continue to
be colonized by contemporary narratives of im/possibility, and explore pathways
for critical resistant to status quo futures through imaginative practice. In
this session, we will engage with a selection of Indigenous narratives that
model futures in radically different ways. Via hands-on and participatory
creative imagining prompts, participants will explore their own sensing of the
future and how this kind of reflective practice can help increase resilience in
the face of uncertainty. Participants will leave this session with a strong
understanding of futures literacies as a concept along with methods for
critique and analysis of contemporary narratives of the future.
Session #2: Technology and the futures imaginary
In this 40-minute session, we will engage with a series of new
media and artistic digital texts that model technologically saturated future
worlds, exploring together the dangers, possibilities, and affordances of
other-than-human futures. The focus in this session will be to inquire into
ongoing developments in colonized/ing digital technologies and articulate
pathways for creative and critical resistance that might move us towards more
beneficial relationalities in and with our machines. Participants will explore
and discuss their own affective responses to technologized futures and will
leave the session with creative methods for collaborating with digital
technologies to tell different stories of possibility.
1) Cannupa Hanska Luger: Imagining a Future Rooted in Indigenous Technologies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGCJs36mhao
2) ‘Built Ford Proud’ Ford Ad Campaign (Feat. Bryan Cranston) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXLPwMn5l9o
3) Artist Profile: Rachel Rossin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb1ObJmF3ag
4) 22-year-old Ojibwe robotics inventor promotes tech education among Indigenous youth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boLg6manH1k&t=4s
5) Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) | Full Film https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWjnYKyiUB8
Session #3: Fictopoeisis and creative futures writing
In this 30-minute creative writing and imagining session, we
will engage in a practice of what Rachel theorizes in her doctoral studies as
fictopoeisis – or the creation of fictions to inquire into future worlds. The
focus of fictopoeisis is exploration, experimentation, curious inquiry, and
play in and with imagined future spaces. Participants will be introduced to a
series of creative digital writing and imagining prompts that help spark the
emergence of fictional peoples, technologies, and materialities to explore
through creative and expressive writing. Participants will have time to write
in a group context and share the surprising landscapes of their imaginary
future worlds.
Session #4: A future for futures
In this final 30-minute participatory session we will share the
results of our creative process, along with thoughts, feelings, questions, and
- if participants wish - a performance of the fictopoeitic future worlds that
were created in the previous session. We will return again to the concept of
futures literacies and share thoughts about the experience and what was evoked
through their practice of fictopoeisis. Finally, we will engage a new activity—
the participatory design of a futures imagining prompt that might provoke different
shades of future futures imagining. This activity is based upon her recent
doctoral research and will be the first time Rachel has tried it out with a
group. We will experiment together and see how it goes!
