Small stories of past futures: Celebration, resistance, and cultivating the unknown
Submission Type
Paper
Start Date/Time (EDT)
19-7-2024 4:45 PM
End Date/Time (EDT)
19-7-2024 5:45 PM
Location
Hypertexts & Fictions
Abstract
In November 2021 a group of teacher candidates came together in a futures literacies workshop and played a simple digital card game to help them generate imaginative narratives of the future. These digital stories remain entwined with the situated context of that time—a global pandemic still raging, atmospheric rivers flooding the skies and city streets, and an accelerated teacher education program designed to prepare them for increasingly uncertain and perilous tomorrows. What do their past futures imaginings tell us about how these teacher candidates understood the future in troubled times? How do their narratives refigure utopian and dystopian conventions and engage with futures in which up and down have often become indiscernible? Guided by a technological posthumanist onto-epistemology and my own digital arts-based research practices, I will share this rich narrative landscape of past futures imagining. This storied data is part of my doctoral inquiry into the futures literacies of a group of teacher candidates. In this presentation, I will share both the method and the imaginative data generated in this research. This work proceeds upon the premise that the ways we understand and story futures matter to our collective futures imagining— past, present, and future. As Haraway (2016) indicates, we are all entangled in processes of stories telling stories that will tell stories. This data tells of futures before generative AI become a dinner conversation and Chat GPT a regular collaborator in our writing practices, creative and otherwise. In this presentation, I will open a small window into those past futures and share the differences and repetitions to be found there and how they reverberate into contemporary imagining and creative practice. Together we will explore potential creative pathways for resisting the tidal pull of narrative certainty, and collectively safeguarding a radical openness in our futures imagining.
Recommended Citation
Horst, Rachel S., "Small stories of past futures: Celebration, resistance, and cultivating the unknown" (2024). ELO (un)linked 2024. 15.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/hypertextsandfictions/schedule/15
Small stories of past futures: Celebration, resistance, and cultivating the unknown
Hypertexts & Fictions
In November 2021 a group of teacher candidates came together in a futures literacies workshop and played a simple digital card game to help them generate imaginative narratives of the future. These digital stories remain entwined with the situated context of that time—a global pandemic still raging, atmospheric rivers flooding the skies and city streets, and an accelerated teacher education program designed to prepare them for increasingly uncertain and perilous tomorrows. What do their past futures imaginings tell us about how these teacher candidates understood the future in troubled times? How do their narratives refigure utopian and dystopian conventions and engage with futures in which up and down have often become indiscernible? Guided by a technological posthumanist onto-epistemology and my own digital arts-based research practices, I will share this rich narrative landscape of past futures imagining. This storied data is part of my doctoral inquiry into the futures literacies of a group of teacher candidates. In this presentation, I will share both the method and the imaginative data generated in this research. This work proceeds upon the premise that the ways we understand and story futures matter to our collective futures imagining— past, present, and future. As Haraway (2016) indicates, we are all entangled in processes of stories telling stories that will tell stories. This data tells of futures before generative AI become a dinner conversation and Chat GPT a regular collaborator in our writing practices, creative and otherwise. In this presentation, I will open a small window into those past futures and share the differences and repetitions to be found there and how they reverberate into contemporary imagining and creative practice. Together we will explore potential creative pathways for resisting the tidal pull of narrative certainty, and collectively safeguarding a radical openness in our futures imagining.
Bio
Rachel Horst is a PhD candidate in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research explores creative and digital arts-based methods to investigate technologically saturated meaning-making practices and collaborative digital literacies. Guided by a posthuman onto-epistemological perspective her work cultivates speculative educational futures, writing-as-becoming, and narrative futuring for creating and performing possibility. Her work seeks to map theoretically enriched pathways between literacy scholarship, systems thinking, future literacies research, and sustainability education.