Workshop: Dystopic futures
What can be found in the imaginaries of the undesirable?
We welcome you to dip with us into undesirable futures! With this compact futures workshop session, we want to explore how thinking about disasters and horrors affects us. What kinds of embodied feelings, perspectives, or ideas can dystopic imaginaries produce? Can talking about them be liberating in ways that we cannot predict?
The workshop is organised as a participatory collective where the participants shape how future discussions flow. However, during the session, the principles of a safer space are followed. The aim is not to incite despair or powerlessness, which means that we do not imagine personal tragedies but collectively create imaginaries of broader faraway futures. The session ends with acquiring a sense of what emerged from thinking about these futures and centring ourselves back to the present.
Speakers
Riikka Armanto, doctoral researcher, Finland Futures Research Centre
Osku Haapasaari, project specialist, Finland Futures Research Centre
Riikka Armanto is a doctoral researcher at the Finland Futures Research Centre (UTU) focused on the study of futures thinking and action in climate-wise farming. The thematics of participation, anticipation and relationality are elemental in her research. She is very interested in experimental and explorative participatory futures methods and how futures are used (e.g. imagined, contested, created, and pursued). With a background in ecology, Armanto sees herself as a dancing holobiontic complex whose interests lie in the diversity of biospheres, ways of knowing, and embodiment in research.
Osku Haapasaari works as a project specialist at the Finland Futures Research Centre (UTU) and pursues a doctoral degree at the Faculty of Education. He has ten years of experience in working with questions related to the global responsibility of Finnish higher education institutions and is interested in questions of sustainability, equity, and education as a societal phenomenon in the global context. Osku’s daily work consists of managing and coordinating international capacity building projects.