By Dr Verity Jones, Associate Professor in Education
Recently, much of my thinking, particularly in collaboration with Chris Bear (Cardiff University), has led me to think more deeply about death as an ecological, educational and ethical concept that demands a futures lens. In our work on food systems, we ask what it would mean to attend to the deaths of non-human animals and plants – not as abstractions but as lived relations.
In February, I attended the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, Immersive Public Futures Symposium, where themes of loss, endings, disappearance and possibility threaded through discussions of how societies imagine, design and negotiate futures.
International perspectives on imagining futures
Contributions from international speakers underscored that futures – thinking is rarely a smooth trajectory of progress.
- Fabio Rubio Scarano (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/Museum of Tomorrow) foregrounded planetary change and regeneration through anticipating and paying attention both to memory and tomorrow.
- Lisa Bailey (Museum of Discovery, University of South Australia) explored how museums can engage diverse publics with complex and uncertain futures.
- Andrea Bandelli (Woven Foundation for Creative Climate Communication) challenged us to recognise immersion not as a technical medium but as a condition – a relational mode that shapes how we encounter the world and its potential futures and agencies.
- Mandy Rose (UWE Bristol) discussed documentary and digital cultures as tools for imagining post‑carbon possibilities through planty immersion.
- Justin McGuirk (Design Museum, London) examined design-led approaches to futures and the need to construct possible future buildings to imagine within.
- Dan Lockton (Norwich University of the Arts) reflected on how lost futures can help people collaboratively reimagine alternative futures.
- Johannes Stripple (Lund University) used speculative ecology and storying to unsettle fixed narratives of crisis and change.
Across these contributions, there was an insistence that imagining futures requires attending to what is disappearing, threatened or already lost.
Connections
The symposium strongly resonated with work with my own research. Whether supporting young women in imagining near-future careers in construction and engineering, examining ecological timescales in food ethics, or analysing how children’s literature either narrows or expands temporal imagination, much of my work is centrally concerned with how learners inhabit and negotiate time.
This sits alongside collaborations with colleagues at the Global Goals Centre and SPARKS Bristol, where we co-create learning experiences that are research‑informed, inclusive, socially engaged and committed to widening imaginative possibility.
Looking ahead
The symposium has sharpened my thinking on how endings and futures coexist – and how education must hold both. Several publications drawing on this work, including research on identity making, children’s literature and sustainable education, are currently in preparation and will be shared later this year.
