What is needed to make an Erasmus+-funded collaboration project work? The creation of a programme for higher education students funded by Erasmus+ would require a common foundation in EU frameworks, European values as well as the articulation of shared academic values. One example is proof of student achievement in the form of micro-credentials, badges, credits and these may signal different things. Badges and micro-credentials are more common in less formal learning situations, whereas the use of credits imply an adherence to the Bologna process within the academic course system and ECTS accreditation. Beneath the EU framework for higher education, and the conceptions of academic excellence in line with Svallfors and Bexell, lie the often undisclosed adherence to universal academic traditions and values. However, in the development of a programme for higher education students in a project funded by Erasmus+, it became evident that there was a lack of shared conceptual understanding among the partners. A common knowledge base regarding course and programme development and a unified approach to course design did not exist. Trust eroded. In this presentation and by drawing on fictionalised examples from the collaboration through the lens of Bourdieu’s symbolic capital, our aim is to explore the intentional metamorphoses required to find common ground, those needed to enact agency for the sake of upholding academic values in European higher education collaborations, as well as those needed to make the decision to walk away when meaningful collaboration breaks down.

Denna presentation berör skrivande med AI-verktyg och baseras på analyser av ett sammanflätat och kreativt skrivande där mänskliga och icke-mänskliga aktörer skapar fiktionsberättelser om framtiden (Lindberg, Godhe & Bäcke 2025). Studierna utgår från material som samlas in under en dag kallad Futures Day, vilket också är benämningen på själva forskningsprojektet som samproduceras sedan 2023 av högskola och gymnasieskola. Under dagen skapar elever tillsammans med generativ AI (GenAI) framtidsberättelser på temat teknik och hållbarhet.

Det teoretiska ramverket utgår ifrån en postdigital förståelse där mänskligt handlande och algoritmiska processer ses som sammanflätade (Lindberg 2025). För att förstå kreativt skrivande med GenAI behöver fokus ligga på skärningspunkten mellan material, människa och teknik (Cascone & Jandrić, 2021). Både det postdigitala och det posthumanistiska perspektivet ställer sig kritiska till att människan har full kontroll över kreativa processer och framhåller istället ömsesidigheten och hur olika aktörer formar varandra. I analysen används Barads (2007) begrepp diffraktion som tankeredskap för att förstå det dynamiska, flytande och sammanflätade i en kreativ process där fiktiva berättelser uppstår genom intra-aktion. Intra-aktion utgår ifrån relationella aspekter där aktörer är i ständig inter-aktion med varandra. I denna intra-aktion formas relation till exempel vad gäller olikheter och likheter (Minh-Ha, 1988). 

 Det empiriska materialet består av de berättelser som skapats, samt ljud- och skärminspelningar. I denna presentation fokuseras de sammanlagt 77 berättelser som skapats under 3-årsperioden och en närmare analys görs av ett urval av berättelserna.

En temporal rörelse är utmärkande för berättelserna vilket i sig är förväntat i framtidsberättelser. Dock tar sig beskrivningarna av berättelsernas dåtid, ofta vår nutid, uttryck genom att dåtidens teknik skrivs fram som en del av lösningen på framtidens utmaningar. Berättelserna utmärks även av en rörelse mellan dystopiska och utopiska inslag. Genom att använda tidsmarkörer sammankopplas tid och ”topi” vilket bidrar till nyanserade och trovärdiga skildringar av framtider. Genom att uttrycka både möjligheter och farhågor med framtiden ger berättelserna även uttryck för att framtiden är osäker.

Studien visar på en förståelse av kreativt skrivande som en diffraktiv process av intra-aktioner mellan mänskliga och icke-mänskliga aktörer som även inkluderar föreställningar om framtiden. Sammanflätade kreativa processer har potential att generera nya sätt att tänka kring lärande, uttryck och kunskap där literacy tillåts vara en rörlig, öppen och utforskande process som utmärks av delaktighet. Att undervisning ger utrymme för sådana kreativa processer är avgörande i en tid av snabb teknisk utveckling och förändring av kreativt och kritiskt skrivande och skapande.

Allt större tillgänglighet till AI-teknik, inte minst generativ AI (GenAI), ökar betydelsen av förståelsen för och användningen av AI-verktyg i läsande- och skrivande-aktiviteter. AI-trenden sammanför därmed områdena språk och teknik, vilka ofta fungerar separerade i skolan (cf. Lindberg & Öberg 2023; Snow [1959] 2012). Hur detta närmande kan iscensättas i gymnasieundervisning är utgångspunkten i denna studie som undersöker hur elever på teknikprogrammet (4 klasser från årskurs 1) kollaborativt skriver framtidsberättelser i samverkan med GenAI. För detta syfte samproducerades Futures Day (2023 och 2024) mellan högskola och skola med målet att elevgrupperna färdigställde sina berättelser under en dag och att temat ”teknik, hållbarhet och framtider” respekterades (Lindberg & Haglind in press).

Empirin utgörs av framtidsberättelserna, samt skärminspelningar som visar när, hur, och i vilka syften elevgrupperna samarbetade med AI. Teoretiskt ramas analysen in av AI-teknikens ’inte-ännu-tillstånd’ (not-yetness, Ross 2023) som motiverar ett införlivande av framtidsperspektiv som temporalitet, epistemologi, och performativitet i undervisning och forskning (Cerratto et al. 2023; Ross 2023). Framtidsorienterade perspektiv kan vara produktiva för att utforska hur elever ’fortsätter’ (go on, Buch & Stjerne in press) sitt skrivande trots hinder, genom samverkan med AI och hur de ”spekulerar” (speculate, Ross 2023) och ”föregriper” (anticipate, Miller 2018) morgondagens teknik, där AI, utifrån dagens sociotekniska föreställningsvärld, har en framträdande roll.

Den framtidsorienterade analysen visar mönster gällande hur GenAI användes för att ’fortsätta’ skrivandet, samt vilka föreställningar om framtidens teknik som framträdde och hur. Resultaten ska tjäna explorativa syften gällande förändrade perspektiv och kompetenser i och mellan gymnasiets svensk- och teknikämnen.   

This presentation highlights the importance of giving students structured opportunities to imagine and co-create realities in a rapidly changing world shaped by accelerating technological development and AI. In today’s media-dense society, young people navigate unevenly trustworthy narratives, including promissory discourses “that place high, and often unrealistic expectations on technological innovation” (Lindberg & Haglind 2024, 24). To engage critically and creatively with such conditions, students need futures-oriented competences that allow them to assess present realities while envisioning possible, preferable, and avoidable futures (Lindberg & Johansson 2023).

Drawing on 75 science-fiction narratives (≈1000 words each) co-created by upper-secondary students and GenAI during the annual Futures Day intervention (2023–2025), this study examines what kinds of realities students imagine across temporal scales and how dystopian and utopian orientations shift over time (Lindberg et al. in press). The specific aim is to identify the qualities that characterize students’ temporal framings, how they narrate the past, anticipate near and medium-term futures, and project far-future possibilities, through the interplay between dystopian and utopian elements.

Using a mixed-methods approach, we combine qualitative close reading with quantitative text-as-data techniques (Benoit 2020). After preprocessing the corpus (tokenization, lemmatization, document–term matrices), we map dominant linguistic patterns and detect semantic fields associated with dystopian and utopian imaginaries (e.g., collapse, surveillance, scarcity; resilience, innovation, cooperation). Supervised classification and topic modelling (LDA) further enable us to identify thematic structures and temporal shifts in narrative orientation.

Preliminary findings illuminate how students use dystopia and utopia not merely as opposites but as temporal devices: dystopias often anchor near-future anxieties, while utopian elements emerge in far-future projections where agency, hope, and collective problem-solving are more pronounced. Such insights can inform pedagogical design aimed at strengthening futures literacy, critical thinking, and student agency, while contributing to broader societal understanding of how youth imagine and negotiate technological futures.

The recurring precariousness of some students’ situation when participating in European higher education mobilities is well-known. The Bologna process has three overarching goals – furthering mobility, employability and Europe’s competitiveness and attraction in higher education. Not all European countries have implemented this framework to the same degree, however, which may complicate the situation for Nordic students as achievements may not be valued in the same way in all countries. One aspect emphasised by the Nordic Council of Ministers concludes that micro-credentials (MCs) potentially add value through flexibility, employability and possibilities for lifelong learning, but that there are also limitations regarding academic recognition (Nordic Co-Operation, 2025). The lack of transferability of student achievement challenges the academic credit system, may hamper student mobility, and complicates collaboration between European higher education institutions. What is the added value of MCs from a Nordic student perspective as they wish to  integrate them into their exams from Nordic higher education institutions?

Research topic/aim

To visualise the potential lack of validity and usefulness of MCs, speculative methods enable exploration of possible hurdles for Nordic students if student merits risk being irrelevant at home.

Theoretical framework

With experience from mobility and European higher education collaborations, we apply speculative fiction and vignettes (Selwyn et al. 2020; Ross, 2023) to visualise several fictional possibilities and challenges that surfaced from a student perspective.

Methodology/research design

With speculative fiction (Bayne, Ross & Gallagher, 2022; Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Lindberg, Godhe, & Bäcke, 2025) we explore potential scenarios of Nordic students with merits from European higher education institutions that currently hold little value in the Nordic education systems. Explorative and speculative  scenarios become an analytical tool and lens to highlight problematic aspects related to the differences in validating and accepting new forms of learning achievements in higher education.

Expected results/findings

Where there is a lack of shared conceptual understanding or common knowledge base in line with the Bologna process, a unified assessment of higher education achievements becomes difficult. The major finding in this study is the speculative methodological approach, which allows us to explore varying viewpoints.

Relevance to Nordic educational research

From a Nordic student perspective, we point to critical questions not yet properly addressed. Vignettes help us critically discuss the complexities of student mobility in Europe.

The conditions for creative writing are shifting in the aftermath of publicly available generative AI, impacting teaching and learning writing skills.The enactment and evaluation of creative writing in AI-infused school contexts are yet unexplored terrain. With the aim of contributing knowledge about creative human-algorithmic authorship, this presentation explores student textual production asan entangled process where human and algorithmic creativity emerge together and converge, when collaboratively envisioning scenarios and composing stories about the future. The necessity to engage with futures literacy in education is amplified by rapid AI advances, compelling teachers to include futures perspectives in the learning design (Lindberg & Johansson 2023).

The study is based on longitudinal empirical data collected annually since 2023in the upper secondary school postdigitalintervention project Futures Day(cf. Lindberg & Haglind2024). Previous analysis of the intra-actions (Barad 2007) in the collaborative writing process revealed the emergence of co-authorship involving both student agency and computational creativity (Lindberg, Godhe & Bäcke, in press). While the collaborative process was seen as reshaping authorship, writing practices, and narratives, tensions were also identified concerning the co-created text as a school assignment and questions regarding authenticity and responsibility (cf. Flenady & Sparrow 2025).

In this article, we analyze the stories as artefacts created during Futures Day to explore the outcomes of the human-algorithmic authorship.The analysis aims to answer questions about how genre and content,as well as notions of creativity of the collaboratively written texts are re-negotiated in co-authorships with AI.

Several stories describe a planet ravaged by environmental decline and a surveillance society where technology subjugates humans, yet most narratives also feature creative human resistance; sometimes victorious, sometimes defeated. Several stories close on an optimistic note, with people reclaiming technology to rebuild a better world. In the presentation we will discuss how AI-assisted idea generation and text production cultivate creativity, development of voice, agency, and critical engagement with emerging AI technologies.

Introduction: Climate, environment, and ecological sustainability are often in focus in public debates and are strongly associated with the concept of sustainability. These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but environmental issues and climate change can be said to fall under an ecological perspective on sustainability. However, there are other aspects of the concept that are also relevant when striving for a more long-term sustainable future. This entry focuses on three types of sustainability—ecological, economic, and social. Other types of sustainability, such as cultural, are sometimes mentioned, but the three pillars above are widely accepted (United Nations Global Compact, n.d.). We discuss how these pillars are connected to the digitalization of society in general and the digitalization of schools in particular. School digitalization refers both to the use of digital technology and digital technology as content in education.

Innebörden av artificiell intelligens (AI), främst generative AI i Large Language Models (LLM), för elevers skrivande är ett omdiskuterat ämne. Redskap som t. ex. ChatGPT har visat sig kunna generera text av god kvalitet för att lösa vanliga skoluppgifter. Frågor om hur samarbete där människa och teknik tillsammans skriver texter har på så sätt aktualiserats (Henrickson 2021). För att undersöka detta närmare samproduceras Futures Day av högskola och skola årligen sedan 2023, med målet att elevgrupper kollaborativt skapar berättelser med AI-verktyg under en dag på temat ”teknik, hållbarhet och framtider” (Lindberg & Haglind, 2024). Denna presentation bygger på analyser av skrivprocessen och hur denna speglas i elevernas berättelser (se Lindberg, Godhe & Bäcke in press).

Teoretiskt ramas analysen in av framtidsperspektiv för att utforska hur elever ’fortsätter’ (go on, Buch & Stjerne 2024) sitt skrivande trots hinder, genom samverkan med AI och hur de ”spekulerar” (speculate Ross 2023) och ”föregriper” (anticipate Miller 2018) morgondagens teknik. Posthumanistiska och postdigitala begrepp så som intractivity (Barad 2007) och computational creativity (Sweeney 2023) bidrar till att belysa den kollaborativa processen. Empirin utgörs av skärminspelningar och inspelningar av gymnasieelevers interaktioner som visar när, hur, och i vilka syften samverkan med AI sker samt framtidsberättelserna skapas.

I presentationen tas dels skrivprocessen upp, dels görs en analys av berättelserna som skapats under tre års tid. Resultaten visar dels hur skrivprocessen förändras i spänningsfältet mellan skolpraktiker och förnyade skrivpraktiker med AI-verktyg, dels hur det kreativa skrivandet utvecklas i gränssnittet mellan svensk- och teknikämnet, och mellan elever och AI-agenter.

In this presentation, the aim is to facilitate solutions for diversity, center-peripheries and equity in future education through a model drawing on future scenarios – how higher education students may engage in the ‘not-yetness’ (Ross, 2023) – and uncertainties of globalisation, internationalisation and sustainability. These imaginaries may function, from a transitional perspective, as a transformative force to help unlock, empower, and realise the potential of every individual.

Background and setting

The study is linked to the international Erasmus+-funded Global Teachers for a Sustainable Future (GTSF) project (2023-2026), with partners from ten different countries across three continents (Spain, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Romania, Turkey, Malaysia, Colombia, and Mexico), which focuses on providing future teachers in these countries with possibilities for “internationalisation at home” as tools for integrating sustainable development and global citizenship education in their future teaching. In the GTSF study, both pre-service teachers and higher education students in other fields took part.

Research question and theoretical background

RQ: How do higher education students imagine futures when taking diversity, center-peripheries, and equity into account?

Following Jasanoff’s & Kim’s (2015) exploration of sociotechnical imaginaries – “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (322) – and how these may initiate, shape or alter our realities I will draw on their four phases of development of sociotechnical imaginaries: origins and embedding of, resistance to, and extension of the sociotechnical imaginaries. In line with this and proposed by Siân Bayne, Jen Ross and Michael Gallagher (2022), the eight scenarios for the future of universities in relation to digital technology – extinction-era universities , AI academy, the universal university, extreme unbundling, justice-driven innovation, return to the ivory tower, the university of ennui, and enhanced enhancement – provide a setting for the imaginaries envisioned by the students to explore the ‘not-yetness’ (Ross, 2023; Lindberg, Godhe, & Bäcke, forthcoming) of imagined dystopian or utopian conceptions of the future.

At the core of social sustainability lies the question “What type of society do we want to sustain?” (Davidson, 2009) which highlights the political choices inherent within social sustainability (Wolff & Ehrström, 2020), which, in turn, accentuates a focus on diversity, center-peripheries, and equity. How might we, from a transformative and transitional perspective, use imaginaries to empower individuals?

Methodology

The interventions, performed at Jönköping University in spring and autumn 2024 and spring 2025, draw on group discussions and individual storytelling sessions resulting in the analysis of very short texts (maximum 200 words) based on the above-mentioned eight scenarios for the future (Centre for Research in Digital Education, 2022) with students from two batches of international master’s students. In addition, the analysis of stories written in spring 2024 by university students from five different European countries (Austria, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Ukraine) in collaboration with the GTSF project function as a backdrop. The qualitative data gathered in these sessions were analysed thematically to identify common themes, challenges, and opportunities in relation to transitional aspects of student agency and student voice to explore their ideas of the future related to diversity, center-peripheries and equity, as well as facilitating the incorporation of antiracist, decolonial, and social sustainability perspectives.

Preliminary findings

The integration of diversity, center-peripheries, and equity in education presents both opportunities and challenges as the students’ future scenarios display themes such as the preservation of resources/energy and an attentiveness to the characters’ sustainability impact, unified missions to address global challenges like social inequality, ideas to dissolve traditional disciplinary boundaries to build more flexible, problem-based learning clusters, ensureing diverse perspectives and democratic decision-making and more.