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.