Bite-sized

Day 1: Thursday, 12 September

In this session, we showcase the participatory future visioning methods we deployed in two projects which aimed to support communities with imagining their future amidst the uncertainty of the climate crisis. First, we give an overview of the methods themselves, and how we went about working with groups that tend to be excluded from the making of future imaginaries. In PerfectSTORM, we used group storytelling and drawing sessions in the Peruvian Amazon, with riverine communities who are often invisible in development and planning processes, to facilitate (re)imagining their ways of living with the river in the future. In SHARED GREEN DEAL, we used storytelling, improv and participatory workshops with marginalised communities in three European locations to imagine their energy future (e.g., women in a region of Poland facing a coal phase-out where men dominate the workforce). We elicited group narrations in ways that intended to resonate with those specific communities and to allow their voices to be heard, emphasising place and local. Then, we critically reflect on what the methods achieved, and the challenges we had to navigate. Whilst our aim was to imagine the future, it quickly became clear that ethically, we had to meet people where they were at and start with the past and the present. Only then could we talk about what they would like the future to look like and explore participants’ anticipatory learning on environmental challenges. We end the session with the wider implications of those methods for transforming future social imaginaries.