Future Fiction Makerspace II: Back to the Future
In April 2025, more than 60 colleagues and friends from the teff-Community came together at the University of Cologne to engage in (co-)creating a tool kit for arts-based futures literacy education. In November 2025, we invite past participants as well as newly interested educators, scholars and students to a second workshop on future fictions:
The Future Fiction Makerspace II – Back to the Future!
The Future Fiction Makerspace II will take place virtually and kick off with a first keynote inspiration in which Roman Bartosch describes the co-creative principles for the toolbox approach used to design arts-based futures thinking methods. In different groups, participants will then be invited to join, or continue working with, different futures thinking laboratories:
The Futures Literacy Lab
The Futures Literacy Lab (led by Carmen Sippl) discusses multimodal children’s and young adult fiction and invites practitioners to decode the narrative and visual strategies employed by authors and illustrators to open up imaginative spaces for possible, probable, and desirable alternative futures.
The Climate Fiction Lab
The Climate Fiction Lab (led by Natalie Dederichs) explores the important role that literary fiction plays in teaching young learners about sustainability-oriented topics in literature and language education. It aims to provide educators with the knowledge and resources they need to make informed decisions about incorporating climate fiction into their lessons.
The Poetry Lab
The Poetry Lab (led by Tanya Gautam) invites you to engage with poetic strategies and creative writing as a way of sensing, reflecting upon and articulating emotions stirred by socioecological crises. Whether grim or beautiful, the future is alive and continually resonating with our multiple visions. Together we will discuss how poetry helps us consider the echoes we project and speculate about their survival.
The Theatre Lab
The Theatre Lab (led by Leonie Carell and Ioana-Cristina Capatu) explores experiential spaces in which learners sensorially experience, embody, and critically reflect on alternative future scenarios. The Theatre Lab Revisited discusses how performative learning can strengthen imagination, empathy, agency, and reflection.
The Exhibition Lab
In the Exhibition Lab (led by Celestine Caruso), curatorial theory and practice is used to enhance futures literacy. We are going to discuss this curatorial approach to futures literacy including its possibilities, challenges and adaptations to different contexts.
Keynote Inspirations
A final keynote inspiration by Wolfgang Hallet, “Reading Fiction: Thinking and Designing Futures”, charts new ground for further collaboration by returning to the role of engaging with fiction(s) and discussing insights from cognitive narratology, which contends that in relation to the reader’s or viewer’s real world, fictional worlds are always possible worlds and thus inspire the reader’s imagination of potential futures of their own worlds and to build hypotheses on the futures of characters, social lives, conflicts, actions etc. and on how and by what individual and collective fictional futures are shaped and designed.
Programme
Thursday, November 27, 2025 (online) | |
| 14:00 - 14:15 | Welcome and Introduction JProf. Dr. Wiebke Dannecker (University of Cologne teff Representative) |
| 14:15 - 15:00 | Co-Creative Tools for Futures Literacy: The Storylearning Approach Prof. Dr. Roman Bartosch (University of Cologne teff Representative) |
| 15:00 - 16:00 | Lab Work (Break-Out Rooms) |
| 16:00 - 16:30 | Discussion of Results and Future Collaboration |
| 16:30 - 17:15 | Keynote: Thinking and Designing Futures |
| 17:15 - 17:30 | Farewell |
Please register here until Monday, November 3rd 2025.
If you have any questions, please contact: future-fiction[at]uni-koeln.de