Sustainability issues has been described as post-normal, “that facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent” (Block et al., 2018, p. 1425). As such they cannot strictly be understood as scientific but rather ingrained with questions of meaning, value and justice. These post-normal characteristics are also fundamental to the relationship between democracy and sustainable development, as the time and space for the democratic process seems to shrink as the urgency of sustainability issues increases (ibid.). This poses a problem for democratic education in balancing the tension between the present urgency and the possibilities for critical reflections and imagination. One challenge is therefore how teaching in ESE can make space for political subjects  and at the same time face (Todd & Säfström, 2008) this urgency and the emotions entangled with the sustainability issues.

One way of approaching this is through education in which students get to participate in the democratic process in schools. Hence, letting political subjects emerge, not to solve the crisis made by others, but to bring in new ways of knowing and being together in and with the world. Through Rancière's (2010) perspective on politics and dissensus the political subject emerges when students make interventions on the established order thereby altering the possible by making present what was before absent or unimaginable.

One way of making space for dissensus can be related to the possibility to re-imagine the future and Amsler & Facer (2017) proposes that one important function for democratic education is to facilitate the capacity for active-creative engagement with the future. The general aim of this study is therefore to investigate if and how environmental and sustainability education (ESE) can stimulate students to re-imagine the futures possible and to discuss its implications/possibilities for democratic education. In this paper we are testing and investigating one, amongst many possible methods of conducting teaching that have the goal to re-imagine the future, namely to use dystopian texts in teaching. According to Löwe & Nilsson Skåve (2020) dystopian texts are considered a suitable way in which teaching can deal with complex social issues of our time and according to Soares (2020 p. 74) as a way “for students to conceive a brave new world”. This brings forth the question – if and then how dystopia can be used to stimulate students to re-imagine the futures possible and make space for dissensus in ESE?  

This study’s point of departure is grounded in a didactic research tradition which departs from socio-cultural theory, drawing on a pragmatic and poststructural approach. We make use of a transactional theory where meaning in a situation is created in a two-way reciprocal relationship between humans and the environment through experiences (Garrison et al., 2022), and where the human-text relationship is seen as transactional (Rosenblatt, 1982).

The transactional perspective in this study enablesd the exploration of the relationship between the reading and the emergence of political subjects. The notion of dissensus focused the attention towards the moments in teaching where yet un-imaginable futures awere made possible. Thereby the study’s design enablesd an exploration of if and how imagination and dissensus are made present through encountering dystopian literature.

This paper rapports from a study where upper secondary teacher-students teaching different school subjects encountered dystopian stories in two workshops during a compulsory course at the end of their teacher education. The workshops were planned to highlight sustainability as a transdisciplinary content and used dystopia as a didactic trigger for imagining the future. Inspired by ethnographic methodology data were collected using audio- and video recorded observations of students’ discussions during the workshops, along with classroom artifacts such as photos of post-it notes and mind maps produced in the discussions. The discussions of seven groups of five students were documented. In the analysis we focus on the disturbances that emerge in the encounters between the literature, each other and the futures imagined. Using the well-established Practical Epistemology Analysis (Lidar et al., 2006; Wickman & Östman, 2002) as an analytical method, we analyze how meaning is created in the students’ discussions. The analysis starts with identifying the ‘gaps’ that occur when the students discuss departing from the encounter with the text, the assignments and each other. A gap may be considered a disturbance, in that it is something that makes the participants in the activity hesitate or become unsettled. In order to proceed with the activity, the students need to create ‘relations’ between what they already know, what ‘stands fast’ from previous experience, and something new. Meaning is made through the created relations. The analysis seeks to describe situations and relations where something new, imaginative and/or visionary is made present in the discussions, as well as how they use established dominant discourses that they seek to create an alternative to in creating relations (as part of making up the alternative). Disturbances can thus be identified by gaps, while dissensus can be discerned through studying how the students construct and communicate their visions of the future in relation to what in this construction is presented as dominant discourses or ‘commonsense’.

A preliminary outcome of the empirical analysis is that dissensus are manifested in different ways during the re-imagination of the future. Some occurs in gaps that is situated in a dispute with classmates. Others occurs when gaps involve an “order” that is represented by a group, organization or person not present in the classroom. In other cases, the dissensus is occurring when students are trying to re-imagine with the help of for example a contrasting strategy, i.e. pointing towards a future they don’t want to experience. In all these examples the dystopian text is used, but in different ways: as a starting point, as an illustration, as an inspiration in the re-imagination, etc. In all these cases different “orders” are also drawn upon, but in different ways. To use a dystopian text in ESE teaching requires didactical work to be fruitful for students learning, and is particularly crucial if one wants to use its potential for enabling political subjects to emerge. The paper illustrates and discuss the didactical role of the teachers in the actual re-imagination of the students and ends with a more general elaboration on how ESE can be part of democratic education.

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