Copyright

Felicitas Macgilchrist, Eamon Costello

Published On

2023-10-25

Page Range

pp. 445–472

Language

  • English

Print Length

28 pages

19. Imagination and justice: Teaching the future(s) of higher education through Africanfuturist speculative fiction

Chapter of: Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures(pp. 445–472)
How might inclusion, equity, justice, care and sustainability be set to glimmer in higher education? This chapter draws on educational theory, critical research, and storytelling - in particular Africanfuturist science fiction - to dream new educational interfaces that are oriented for good. The chapter first maps out a 15 week course where students study the Africanfuturist science fiction novella Binti before writing their own storied futures for higher education in response. In the second half of the chapter another voice takes up the pen to imagine they are a student taking the course, and thus speculatively enact it. The chapter aims to open spaces for students and lecturers to: reflect on their (our) own positions in the academy, to critique the reproduction of classed, raced, gendered inequities in higher education through the encroachments of automation and platformisation, but then to generate futures that are oriented to justice.

Contributors

Felicitas Macgilchrist

(author)
Professor of Digital Education and Schools at University of Oldenburg
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2828-4127

Felicitas Macgilchrist is Professor of Digital Education and Schools at the University of Oldenburg (Germany). Her research explores the cultural politics of educational technology, taking up critical and speculative approaches. She is currently thinking about how design justice can be centred in edtech development, school practice and public discourse. She is co-editor of Learning, Media and Technology and toots occasionally at @discoursology@social.coop.

Eamon Costello

(author)
Associate Professor, Digital Learning at Dublin City University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2775-6006
https://www.dcu.ie/researchsupport/research-profile?person_id=14193#tab-research

Eamon Costello is an associate professor of Digital Learning in Dublin City University (Ireland). He is deeply curious about the ways in which we can actively shape our world so that we can have better and more humane places where we can think, work, live and learn. He is an advocate of using the right tool for the job or sometimes none at all, for not everything can be fixed or should be built.