Written by: Rachel Horst. The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Abstract: While the future does not exist, narratives of futurity have powerful sway upon the way things unfold in the present. Teachers’ implicit feelings and beliefs about futurity can impact student outcomes and their sense of agency to make a difference in the world. This paper describes an arts-based research project that seeks to both explore and cultivate creative ways of feeling, imagining, and writing futurity among a group of teacher candidates in a teaching writing course. The paper describes a futures literacies writing workshop along with an assemblage of methodologies that instrumentalize technological posthumanist theory towards imagining and storying future difference. This research positions and challenges the posthumanisms as an invitation to engage with the discrete centrality of human desire for preferable outcomes and to instead cultivate interest in the deeply entangled processes of knowing and becoming that constitute the (other-than) human. The project reaches imaginatively into the unknown, seeking not answers but creative possibility. By engaging with posthumanist and digital arts-based methodologies in teacher education and qualitative research it is hoped that new intra-agential narratives of both futures literacies praxis and futures-oriented qualitative research might emerge.
Keywords: futures literacies; narrative; technological posthumanism; meanwhile; creative writing; digital writing prompts