Futures + Literacies + Methods Lab

Exploring creative engagement practices that foster ethical and livable possibilities

The Futures + Literacies + Methods Lab brings together communities of practice across scientific and community sectors to experiment with creative methods for fostering greater critical consciousness around the personal and societal impacts of AI, datafication, and deeply entangled human-technology relations. 

The Futures + Literacies + Methods Lab provides a platform to design and test participatory action interventions and pedagogical methods that spark greater critical consciousness about the intersections of emerging technologies, lived experience, and future societal formations. This is critical in times of rapid AI deployment across all sectors of society.

Engaged: We are interested in processes and practices for generating critical future-oriented literacies across sectors. We take an engaged and interdisciplinary approach. We do this work through classroom-based experiences with young adults, creative public engagement, community engaged learning, and arts-based interventions.

Critical: We find novel ways to weave strong critical theory into everyday reflections about tech futures. 

Speculative: We work with a range of stakeholders to craft customised methods for speculative design thinking and heuristic reverse engineering, aimed at rethinking how forecasting and backcasting can work to bring more ethical societal concerns to the foreground.

Method-Focused: Researchers connected to the Futures + Literacies + Methods Lab embrace a pragmatist approach to method, mixing humanities, social science, and computational approaches as needed. We think this is vital to richly analyse how largescale issues are experienced at the local and situated level of communities and families, when largescale governance policies or big concepts like UN Sustainability Development Goals hit the ground or meet with human levels of practice, everyday life and learning. And because we focus on fostering greater literacies, a strong pedagogical thread runs through the Futures + Literacies + Methods Lab methodological approaches.

Connected: Futures + Literacies + Methods Lab is part of an international network of Futures related Institutes and Centres, including WASP-HS at Linköping University & University of Copenhagen, the Futures Hub at Monash University, the Bristol Digital Futures Institute at the University of Bristol, and the Critical Data Studies Cluster at the University of Edinburgh Futures Institute. 

Get Involved!

For more info, please contact the Lab director, Prof dr. Annette Markham at a.n.markham@uu.nl. She is Chair Professor of Media Literacies and Public Engagement at Utrecht University. Markham is also an affiliated member at the Centre for Digital Humanities (UU).