AISC 2024

We are confronted with global crises: political instability, environmental destruction, and increasing global inequalities. The dominant, evidence-based discourses in education do not seem to be offering adequate responses to these crises.

I consider crisis as an opportunity to interrupt the ‘normal’ order; to consider the conditions that have given rise to it, what it says about who we are as humans and how we might be able to imagine and do things differently to work towards collaborative, participatory, plural, just and imaginative futures. In this keynote, we will tackle the questions ‘How can educators respond to a world in crisis and create alternative futures in the present?’ and ‘How can the imagination be put to work in educational spaces?’

We will shift the focus from problem-solving and crisis responses to possibility and mutual aid. We will explore educational practices that involve imaginative, utopian and speculative thinking and acting. Education and schools in particular will be repositioned and reimagined as spaces where alternative futures emerge, starting here and now.