The present study is developed within the project “Democracy Meets Arts: Critical Change Labs for Building Democratic Cultures through Creative and Narrative Practices” (CCLAB). CCLAB is part of the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program and seeks to understand and address current trends in democratic erosion in Europe. The project consists of a consortium of ten partners across Europe. One of the main objectives of the project is to develop a methodological framework to strengthen critical democratic education among young people. To this end, the project is inspired by the Change Laboratory method (Engeström et al., 2015) and critical pedagogies (Freire, 2012) to develop a pedagogical model to support and strengthen participatory and everyday democracy among young people. It employs Participatory Action Research (PAR) and arts-based and creative methods to iteratively design a pedagogical model that fosters everyday and participatory democracy among young people. 

The development of this pedagogical model takes place through three iterative PAR cycles across 19 European countries between 2024 and 2025. Each cycle involves evaluation and reflection, which inform the model's redesign and improvement. At a methodological level, the model is structured around the four phases: (1) Onboard: Establishing initial contact with participants and introducing the CCLAB model; (2) Question and Analyze: Facilitating the collective identification and examination of a shared issue related to everyday democracy; (3) Envision and Act: Guiding participants through the ideation, design, and development of a potential intervention to address the identified issue. (4) Reflect: Engaging in a shared evaluation of the process, drawing lessons and insights from the experience.

In the third phase of the CCLAB project, Envision and Act, a particular emphasis is placed on supporting students in imagining alternatives and possible futures to empower them as potential agents of change. This phase draws upon methodological approaches derived from design futuring (Howell et al., 2021; Kozubaev et al., 2020), fabulation-based approaches (Søndergaard et al., 2023), speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2013), and speculative fiction (Haraway, 2016). These approaches aim to inspire critical and imaginative thinking, enabling students to explore possibilities beyond the constraints of present eco-social challenges.

From a research perspective, these approaches have been identified as promising strategies for supporting a variety of learning goals. These include: supporting critical reflection on current eco-social challenges (Maxwell et al., 2019; Burton et al., 2018; Hansen, 2021), encouraging students to advocate for inclusive values in their lives (Sharma et al., 2021), releasing childrens’ imagination around design possibilities (Hardy, 2019) and opening new paths for reflections on educational systems (Hrastinski & Jandrić, 2023).

The shared experiences of researchers involved in the CCLAB project reveal that participating students often face significant challenges when imagining alternative futures. These challenges include difficulties in conceptualizing futures that move beyond existing paradigms, a tendency to envision utopias without considering realistic paths to achieve them, and struggles to translate abstract ideas into practical, actionable visions. This paper aims to explore these challenges through three illustrative case studies from three PAR cycles in the CCLAB process.

The research described in this paper builds on the fieldwork of three case studies of three PAR cycles that took place as part of the CCLAB process. The first case took place in Barcelona and involved a total of 7 young people between 13 and 14 years old, 4 researchers and 1 educator. The second case took place in Dublin and surrounding counties in Ireland and involved a total of 10 young people between 16-23 years old, 3 researchers and 2 educators. The third case took place in Oulu and involved a total of 4 young people between 15-17 years old, 4 researchers and 1 educator. As part of a broader methodological design, the evaluation of this fieldwork included researchers’ observations collected through diaries, interviews with educators and focus groups with youth. For this paper, we will focus specifically on the reflections and outcomes related to the Envision and Act phase. The methodological approach for the Envision and Act was designed to guide students through a series of activities aimed at fostering their capacity for imagining alternative futures. The methods employed included: guided visualization, future scenarios design, group collage, zine making, speculative design, mirror data, mind mapping, futures triangle. The Barcelona case focused on supporting students in imagining a society where adultcentrism is no longer the rule. The Dublin case focused on developing new understandings about the topic of discrimination and encouraged participants to embrace multiple perspectives. The Oulu case focused on fostering participants' sense of agency by helping them connect their skills, strengths, and interests to democracy to make their voice visible in society. The project’s variety of methods, the number of researchers involved, and the diversity of outcomes provided fertile ground for stimulating debate and reflection. These insights were shared during various meetings related to the fieldwork. Building on these shared experiences, this paper aims to offer a shared reflection that explores the limits and potentials of the employed methods, as well as the challenges, tensions, and complexities of supporting youth in envisioning alternative and desirable futures.

The outcomes of the fieldwork and the shared reflections allowed identifying some specific challenges, tensions, and complexities related to supporting youth in envisioning alternative and desirable futures. Specifically, in the case of Barcelona, while collectively identifying the topic of the PAR cycle was very fluid, transforming their complaints and desires into any concrete action was challenging. Speculative design proposals only worked for two participants, while for the rest it was hard to enter into an imaginative dimension. Moreover, we suspect that the presence of pre-existing scholar dynamics provoked an adult’s management overreliance. In the case of Dublin, participants were limited by the constraints of their reality. While the facilitators encouraged the group to use imagination and not be limited by logistics and legal limitations, they were reluctant to explore that. In the Oulu case, ideation was hard for all of the participants. Some groups identified abstract and non-contextualised societal issues and then struggled to conduct their research attending to the complexities of the selected issue. Such broad framing also impacted envisioning activities in which students had difficulties imagining alternatives and opted to focus on raising social awareness on the issues, instead. Moreover, the school dynamics were also a constraint when ideating the final creation. These outcomes allow us to think about the limitations of introducing speculation into a realistic context as the school and the limited previous exposure of the participants to speculative thinking. Moreover, the saturation and inaction experienced by some participants when trying to imagine alternative futures (Ray, 2020) and the capacity to do it collectively (Atkinson and Ray, 2024) is especially relevant.

Atkinson, J. & Ray, S. J. (eds). (2024). The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World. University of California Press. Burton, E., Goldsmith, J., & Mattei, N. (2018). How to Teach Computer Ethics through Science Fiction: Science fiction in particular offers students a way to cultivate their capacity for moral imagination. Communications of the ACM, 61(8), 54-64. Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press. Engeström, Y. (2015). Learning by expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. (2nd edn.). Cambridge University Press. Freire, P. (2012). Pedagogía del oprimido. Siglo XXI. Hansen, K. S. (2021). Optimistic Fiction as a Tool for Ethical Reflection in STEM. Journal of Academic Ethics, 19(3), 425-439. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hardy, A. (2019). Using Design Fiction to Teach New and Emerging Technologies in England. Technology and Engineering Teacher, 78(4), 16-20. Howell, N., F. Schulte, B., Twigger Holroyd, A., Fatás Arana, R., Sharma, S., & Eden, G. (2021, May). Calling for a plurality of perspectives on design futuring: an un-manifesto. Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-10). Hrastinski, S., & Jandrić, P. (2023). Imagining Education Futures: Researchers as Fiction Authors. Postdigital Science and Education, 5(3), 509-515. Kozubaev, S., Elsden, C., Howell, N., Søndergaard, M. L. J., Merrill, N., Schulte, B., & Wong, R. Y. (2020). Expanding Modes of Reflection in Design Futuring. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-15. Maxwell, D., Pillatt, T., Edwards, L., & Newman, R. (2019). Applying Design Fiction in Primary Schools to Explore Environmental Challenges. The Design Journal, 22(sup1), 1481-1497. Ray, S. J. (2020). A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. University of California Press. Sharma, S., Hartikainen, H., Ventä-Olkkonen, L., Iivari, N., Eden, G., Kinnunen, E., Holappa, J., Kinnula, M., Molin-Juustila, T., Okkonen, J., Kotilainen, S., Iversen, O., & Fatas, R. (2021). In Pursuit of Inclusive and Diverse Digital Futures: Exploring the Potential of Design Fiction in Education of Children. Interaction Design and Architecture(s), 219-248. Søndergaard, M. L. J., Campo Woytuk, N., Howell, N., Tsaknaki, V., Helms, K., Jenkins, T., & Sanches, P. (2023, July). Fabulation as an approach for design futuring. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1693-1709).