While we may know that the power of everyday and pop culture narratives can shape how people imagine their tech-saturated futures, how much does this knowledge get built into our frameworks for participatory engagements? 

That is, if anticipatory and trajectory logics can shut down efforts to “think otherwise,” through the processes of discursive closure, how much are our intervention techniques actually confronting and shifting this dynamic?

In this talk, Annette Markham briefly talks about this challenge, drawing on three examples from public engagement workshops she facilitated between 2018-2022, to raise questions for open discussion. 

The examples illustrate how a facilitator’s choice and phrasing of concepts matters: first, different types of future-oriented activities are sponsored by the frames of ‘forecasting’, ‘backcasting,’ ‘futuring,’ ‘reverse engineering’, or ‘speculative (design) thinking’. 

Second, offering and comparing different frames with participants can help them recognize some of the traps in their own everyday thinking, which in turn may help them resist common discursive closure of popular narratives, to more freely imagine ‘otherwise’ their possible futures with disruptive digital technologies.

Annette's talk will be approximately 40 minutes. Q&A and networking will follow afterwards. Professor Rebecca Coleman will chair the event. 

About Annette Markham

Dr. Annette Markham is Chair Professor of Future Digital and Data Literacies at Utrecht University, Netherlands. A world-leading expert on digital ethics and research design, Markham is well known for developing frameworks for mindful, ethical, and creative approaches to studying digital tech futures. Her work is grounded in nearly 30 years of ethnographic research around how digital transformations impact self-identity formation and socio-cultural practices. Markham also specializes in arts-based public engagement, using critical pedagogy and citizen social science methods to facilitate community-centered knowledges about how algorithmic and data-driven logics impact everyday practices and future imaginaries, particularly among young adults in urban contexts. Founding director of the new Futures, Literacies, & Methods Lab at Utrecht University, Markham previously founded and directed the international Future Making Research Consortium, hosted by Aarhus University.