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.