Cultivating the futures imaginary: Imaginative methods and futures literacies

Cultivating the futures imaginary: Imaginative methods and futures literacies

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1 pm Mountain time, Wednesdays, May 1, 8, 15, 22

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. 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!

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Cost: Free. ? Scroll down to register.

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How will this session be delivered?? Online.???

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This is part of the Maskwacis Cultural College Online Microlearning Series and is open to the public.

Contact Manisha Khetarpal by email? [email protected] or call toll free: 1 866 585 3925

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