How

Imagining the Future for Transformation is an elective course for Master’s students. In this highly participatory course, “students embark on a ten-week journey as members of the social movement – ‘Creative Collectives for Utopia’ (CC4Utopia), which serves as a critical and imaginative friend for transformative societal initiatives. CC4Utopians learn how to become both an archaeologist and co-designer of the future:

• An archaeologist in the sense of uncovering the politics and dynamics that have narrowed what futures we see as plausible, or even possible.
• A co-designer through their collaboration with diverse societal groups to generate approaches that can convincingly challenge the status quo and help expand our imagination and action towards more just and sustainable futures.”

About 40 students take part in the course each year. They mostly come from the university’s Sustainable Development program, however some students also come from Innovation, Sustainable Business, etc.

Josephine Chambers, who designed and leads the course, analyzed the first session’s experience, in 2023, in a long blog post. However, the course continuously evolves based on the previous years’ experience. What follows is based on this paper as well as an interview with Josephine Chambers.

Creating the space for critical and creative work

The course kicks off during a meeting that takes place in one of Utrecht’s creative spaces, outside of the university. The goal is to create a friendly, interactive space where students can both share, and come to accept the diversity of perspectives in the class.

Students have been asked to come with something that describes “how they picture the future”. Some came with a text, or a poem, others with a drawing, one with a diorama. The first takeaway from this is to understand that one can think about the future in very different ways, and on very different scales (e.g., from personal to global). While these images of the future are being shared, students are invited to move in the room, depending on how close or far away they feel towards each image. Those closest or furthest away are asked to explain why. To move beyond superficial differences, another exercise encourages small group discussions between students who found themselves in different corners of the room, often in relation to  different academic backgrounds. On topics that can get very emotional, the goal, at this stage, is to encourage human-to-human interactions, with no need to perform in front of others.

The “Creative Collective for Utopia”

In the spirit of encouraging critical reflection while generating solidarity among them, students are welcomed as members of the university-society boundary movement the “Creative Collectives for Utopia” (CC4Utopia).

After the initial session, one half of the course is dedicated to introducing students to both theory as well as case studies. However, the more traditional lectures are interspersed with many experiential moments and exercises: “opinion lines” along which students stand to see their differences on a certain question; interrogate the coloniality behind a personal object that matters for each student; mapping the trip from home to university and reflecting on what is and is not on the map; collages from magazines to describe decolonial futures, etc.

Aside from not overloading students with content, one of the goals of these exercises is, in Josephine Chambers’ words, “to give students space where they can feel creative, where they can express their authentic emotions and their normative opinions on things, and navigate those differences together.”

The outcome of this first part are “Utopian Guides”, where each student distills what they learned about how people can think about, or engage with, the future, using creative forms with an audience in mind. A former high school teacher from Indonesia imagined a curriculum on futures for Indonesian students; others explored the power of music in processes of imagination; one student analyzed what dominant imaginaries were expressed in past issues of National Geographic.

The initial group, in 2023, also came up with a set of six “principles” that they see as “vital to consider in any initiative that seeks to reimagine and reshape the future”: Plural process (effective participation and diversity), Decolonial justice (questioning dominant narratives and power relations to liberate imagination), Generative temporality (connecting past and future), Creative modes (to diversify modes of thinking as well as perspective and generate “compelling alternative imaginations of how the world could be otherwise”), Prefigurative power (looking for tangible and experiential futures, beyond pure imagination), and (Self)reflexive positionality (reflecting on how peoples’ background, experiences and identities shape preferred futures and ways of futuring).

Engaging with real-world creative initiatives

In the second part of the course, students collaborated with real-life organizations that, as part of their work, engaged with imagination and the future in creative ways. Some were found close by, in the Netherlands, and others in Africa, Asia or Latin America. There were several challenges there. One was to avoid extractivism, just asking projects for their time while not knowing whether or how they would benefit from the students’ work. Part of the answer was to compensate them upfront for the time spent with the students. The other was for the students to find the right “distance” in order to be both appreciative and critical towards the projects, particularly for projects that come from a culture that they know little about: how, in the face of an ambitious, well-led, deeply grounded project, to be more than just supportive, but develop a reciprocal relation?

In the case of West Papua’s “Green State Vision”, the students came up with a list of questions that would help the organization further the different ways in which they imagined this future.  This year, the students are designing situations that can open up space for imagination in the context of crises of the imagination, such as the deadlock between farmers and the Dutch government, and the harmful hidden impacts of the EU’s green energy transition.

Each year’s course ends with the publication of a booklet entirely produced by the students: “Creatives Collective for Utopia” (2023;pdf), “Visions of Better Worlds” (2024; pdf).

What

According to Josephine Chambers, the students’ feedback is very positive. However, the experience also taught the teachers a few things.

Students expressed how much they appreciated having room for creative expression. Some were, however, anxious about how to approach the openness of creative assignments and still achieve a high grade Over time, most students came to appreciate this freedom of expression that is not so typical of academic assignments. 

One important issue from the start has been to deal with the powerful emotions that the course’s topic evoked within many of the students. These emotions are not just intellectual: young students may rightly feel, or even have experienced, that their personal future is as threatened, or limited, as the collective future.

Josephine Chambers mentions two distinct, although related, factors connected to these emotions: certainty, and polarization. Certainty would refer to the quick identification of what the causes of the problems are, who is responsible, and who can or cannot be part of the solution. Such certainty, though often born out of legitimate anger, can shut down the possibility to explore different possibilities.

Polarization, which can quickly appear within the class itself, could make it difficult for people harboring differing views on one or several issues to interact, evolve, and be open to different perspectives. Part of the pedagogical work was to deal with these potential issues, seeing them both as learning opportunities, and as moments of discomfort that should be navigated with care.

The course also grapples with the question of: is it the content (what is said about possible, desirable, etc. futures), or the process (how one creates space and capabilities for people to imagine)? One way to ease this tension is, in Chambers’ words, to “embed futures work into real social movements that are actively trying things out in the real world”, rather than just dreaming futures in safe, privileged settings. This helps students learn that it is important to treat the content and process as intertwined.