Article
Nur Anisah Abdullah
College of Education, Tamkang University,
Abstract
The capacity to imagine shared futures is under increasing strain. This paper argues that the erosion of social imagination is not an individual deficit but a systemic condition shaped by market logics, performative metrics, and technocratic visions that narrow agency and responsibility. Drawing on Futures Studies, peace research, and feminist futures scholarship, it examines how images of the future shape social direction and ethical judgement. Using Causal Layered Analysis, the research reveals the deeper metaphors, worldviews, and institutional structures that constrain imagination in education. Change Progression Scenarios then illustrate how different depths of change may reorient learning, knowledge, and responsibility in higher education. The paper concludes with a reflection on pedagogical practice, showing how classroom design and participatory futures methods can help restore imagination as a shared civic capacity.
Keywords:
Social Imagination, Futures Studies, Higher Education, Ethical Responsibility, Causal Layered Analysis.
Introduction
Across contemporary societies, the capacity to imagine collective futures that are ethical, peaceful, and life-sustaining appears increasingly fragile. Despite accelerating technological innovation and expanding systems of foresight, shared visions of wellbeing, care, and collective responsibility struggle to take form. Futures are often framed as risks to manage, markets to anticipate, or trajectories to optimise, leaving limited space for ethical deliberation or relational accountability. This condition reflects a structural narrowing of the horizon of possibility. Fisher (2009) describes a cultural atmosphere in which existing economic arrangements appear unavoidable, while Castoriadis (1987) shows how collectively produced meanings stabilise institutions and shape expectations. Critiques of the neoliberal imagination suggest that what appears as imaginative failure may mark the systemic success of institutions that restrict the conditions under which alternatives can be conceived (Nowak, 2017). Berardi (2011) further argues that cognitive capitalism, marked by acceleration, informational overload, and precarity, produces a sense of futurelessness in which meaningful long-term alternatives become difficult to imagine. Societies may continue to analyse change while losing the capacity to hold futures with care, responsibility, and ethical imagination.
This condition is particularly visible in higher education. Universities have long been shaped by social and economic forces, from medieval European institutions embedded in guilds and civic life (Rashdall, 1895/1936; Rüegg, 1992–2011) to Islamic and Buddhist centres grounded in religious and philosophical traditions (Makdisi, 1981). The present moment is marked by an intensified managerial logic, where performance metrics, employability narratives, and market alignment narrow the space for ethical reflection and collective imagination. Learning is increasingly oriented towards adaptation to presumed futures, with less attention to evaluating or co-creating alternatives. Students may develop analytical competence while remaining disconnected from questions of responsibility, difference, and care across time. Imagination is treated as a peripheral creative skill, although it is central to civic life, peace, and democratic responsibility.
Futures Studies responds by positioning imagination as a disciplined and socially consequential practice. It examines how futures are shaped through meaning, values, and collective interpretation. Polak (1973) shows that societies are sustained by compelling images of the future that organise direction, while Boulding (1988) frames imagination as a relational social capacity cultivated through dialogue and institutions. Work in feminist futures further foregrounds care, relationality, and plural ways of knowing in challenging dominant imaginaries that privilege control, abstraction, and efficiency. Futures Studies therefore enables learners to interrogate assumptions, explore multiple futures, and engage with the ethical dimensions of long-term change.
This research is guided by three questions. First, how can the failure of imagination be understood as a civilisational condition beyond individual or pedagogical deficit? Second, how do shared images of the future shape social direction and responsibility? Third, how can Futures Studies reawaken imagination as a shared ethical capacity, and what does this require of educators?
The paper unfolds in five parts. The first conceptualises the failure of imagination as a civilisational risk within broader debates on social reproduction and responsibility. The second examines images of the future as drivers of social direction. The third explores imagination as a social practice, drawing on peace research and feminist futures scholarship. The fourth applies Causal Layered Analysis (Inayatullah, 1998) to examine the deeper narratives, systems, and metaphors shaping imagination in higher education, followed by Change Progression Scenarios (Inayatullah, 2016; Milojević, 2005, 2011, 2023) that explore alternative futures. The final section reflects on my practice as an educator and futurist, considering the responsibilities and possibilities of cultivating futures imagination in higher education.
The Failure of Imagination as Civilisational Risk
Imaginative failure is often treated as an individual limitation, yet in modern societies it increasingly appears as a systemic condition. Arthur C. Clarke’s reflections on the hazards of prophecy offer an early diagnosis of this problem. In Hazards of Prophecy, Clarke (1962) shows that persistent errors in anticipating the future arise from constrained imagination as much as from lack of information. In scientific and technological cases, experts dismissed developments that later became commonplace because they exceeded prevailing conceptual frames. These failures reflected confidence in inherited assumptions about what was considered possible. Clarke therefore insists that imagination must operate as disciplined inquiry into possibility, alongside empirical reasoning. When institutional caution, disciplinary boundaries, and habitual categories of thought prematurely close down imagination, societies may fail to recognise transformative change until it is already underway.
Johan Galtung extends this critique into the ethical domain. In Probing the Dark to Make for Better Futures, he observes that social systems often become highly proficient at analysing violence while remaining unable to imagine pathways beyond it (1996). Knowledge may accurately describe conflict, inequality, and repression, yet leave intact the structures that reproduce suffering. Such analysis can be empirically rigorous while remaining ethically inert. When learners are trained to interpret conflict as a recurring pattern without imagining transformation, education produces insight without responsibility. Freire’s (1970) warning about reflection divorced from praxis is echoed here, as learners may understand histories of injustice yet struggle to move towards nonviolent alternatives.
Recent critical theory helps explain why constraints on imagination persist despite their recognised consequences. Fisher’s (2009) concept of capitalist realism describes a cultural condition in which current economic and political arrangements appear inescapable, making alternative futures seem implausible or naïve and producing a sense of futurelessness. Social problems are recast as individual challenges instead of structural conditions requiring transformation, while education is shaped by what Fisher calls business ontology, where value is measured through productivity, performance, and market relevance. Castoriadis (1987) locates these limits within deeper social meanings, where shared imaginaries such as growth, development, and progress shape institutional behaviour and expectations about the future. As these imaginaries become embedded within the instituted society, they appear natural and inevitable, obscuring their historical origins and narrowing what futures can be imagined. Imagination is therefore constrained through the quiet internalisation of limits, reducing the instituting society’s capacity to create new meanings and arrangements.
These constraints are structural and epistemic. Work by Abdullah (2025) and Milojević (2024, 2025) shows how dominant knowledge traditions often privilege control, abstraction, and emotional detachment, marginalising care, vulnerability, and relational responsibility in ways that narrow what futures can be imagined and valued. Sociological critiques of the neoliberal imagination further show how systemic pressures are reframed as personal limitations. Nowak (2017) argues that precarity, competition, and austerity are recast as individual resilience or adaptability, turning the inability to imagine alternatives into a perceived failure of personal creativity while reproducing a worldview that presents institutional limits as natural.
Environmental and ecological crises intensify this concern. They may be read as failures of imagination (Potts & Facer, 2025): an inability to conceive radical planetary disruption, as Ghosh (2017) observes, and to imagine lives beyond modern, industrialised consumption, as reflected in the work of Kingsnorth and Hine (2009). Berardi’s (2011) account of cognitive capitalism deepens this diagnosis, showing how informational acceleration and overload erode the capacity for sustained, long-term imagination. The future becomes associated with uncertainty and exhaustion, while cultural production turns towards repetition, retro aesthetics, and incremental variation instead of transformative possibility.
For learning, the implication is clear: imagination can be diminished by structural, epistemic, and cognitive conditions, and nurtured through intentional pedagogy. Its erosion is shaped by how knowledge is valued and whose ways of knowing are recognised. Learners need spaces to question inherited assumptions, dwell with uncertainty, and encounter alternative possibilities. Futures Studies frames imagination as ethical, relational, and time-conscious. Cultivated in community, it supports responsibility, care, and the pursuit of just, peaceful, and life-affirming futures.
Images of the Future
Images of the future play a decisive role in shaping collective direction. Polak (1973) shows that societies are guided by material conditions and by the visions they hold about what lies ahead. These images crystallise expectations about agency, progress, and social order, shaping behaviour, legitimising institutions, and orienting historical trajectories. Expansive and life-affirming images can sustain cultural vitality, while narrowed or collapsing images weaken social direction.
This clarifies why imagination matters at a civilisational scale. Clarke (1962) highlights how experts can overlook emerging possibilities within specialised domains, while Polak shows the broader consequences when such limits become institutionalised. Images of the future are socially produced frameworks that shape what appears realistic, desirable, and worth pursuing. In Castoriadis’s (1987) terms, they operate as shared cultural meanings that make particular arrangements appear natural and inevitable.
The evolution of these meanings can be understood through Slaughter’s (2004) transformation cycle, where periods of change begin with breakdowns in familiar assumptions about work, progress, or order. These disruptions prompt re-conceptualisation as alternative interpretations emerge and compete, although only some gain legitimacy through institutions and cultural narratives. Struggles over the future are therefore contests over meaning as well as debates about policy or prediction. New interpretations may begin with individual insight, yet they gain social force when they circulate through collective imaginaries and become embedded in institutional life. Futures practice mediates this process by helping societies recognise breakdowns, explore alternatives, and negotiate new forms of legitimation.
Education is central to this process because curricula, assessment systems, and institutional narratives transmit assumptions about what futures are realistic or attainable. It shapes expectations about agency and possibility, as well as knowledge. When futures are framed through narrow, dystopian, or technocratic narratives, learners may internalise diminished agency and come to see the future as something to adapt to rather than shape. This reflects wider cultural conditions in which existing systems appear inevitable and alternatives become difficult to imagine (Berardi, 2011; Fisher, 2009).
Care, interdependence, and relational responsibility are vital to expanding imagination, as Abdullah (2025) and Milojević (2024, 2025) emphasise. Reopening imagination in education requires wider images of the future, allowing these values to shape what can be imagined, valued, and pursued. Future-oriented identity adds a personal dimension. Singer (1974) argues that learners need to imagine themselves in meaningful future roles, since agency, relationships, obligations, and ethical commitments shape how futures are understood beyond abstract scenarios.
Imagination therefore operates across collective and personal scales, as shared narratives shape institutional expectations and emerging identities. Futures Studies makes these images visible and open to critique, showing that dominant futures are constructed rather than inevitable. Methods such as Causal Layered Analysis connect visible narratives to deeper layers of meaning, worldview, and myth, helping learners move from inherited images towards alternative futures. This raises a further question: how is imagination formed, sustained, and practised in everyday life and institutions?
Imagination as Social Practice
If images of the future shape social direction, the next question is how imagination is cultivated. Elise Boulding’s work shifts attention from images as representations to imagination as social practice. Writing from peace research and feminist traditions, Boulding (1988) understands imagination as learned, relational, and ethically charged, cultivated through institutions, cultural narratives, and everyday interaction. Societies socialise their members into habits of imagining, shaping how people think about time, responsibility, and possibility.
Imagination emerges within shared cultural frameworks that influence what appears plausible, desirable, or thinkable. Polak (1973) and Castoriadis (1987), in different ways, show how societies are organised through collectively produced meanings that orient expectations about change and continuity. As these meanings circulate through institutions, stories, and social norms, they become naturalised as common sense. Imagination therefore develops through social practices such as interpretation, storytelling, and moral reflection, which situate individuals within broader historical trajectories and collective responsibilities.
This shifts attention from individual creativity to the conditions that sustain or constrain collective imagining. Boulding (1988) argues that imagination is essential for peaceful and cooperative futures because it enables communities to hold complexity, empathise across difference, and sustain responsibility across time. When this capacity weakens, societies may continue to analyse problems while losing the ability to envision nonviolent and inclusive alternatives. This erosion is especially visible in contexts shaped by conflict or structural inequality, where futures are foreclosed or delegated to technical expertise. For Boulding, the loss of imagination is inseparable from the erosion of peace because shared futures are a precondition for cooperation and reconciliation.
Education occupies a pivotal position within this social practice. If imagination is cultivated through shared meaning-making, learning environments become key sites where future-oriented thinking can expand or contract. Boulding therefore emphasises dialogue, storytelling, historical reflection, and intergenerational exchange. Through such practices, learners explore alternative futures, confront inherited fears and myths, and locate themselves within longer arcs of social responsibility. Evidence from futures gaming further suggests that experiential engagement can shift perspectives and build futures capabilities in meaningful, though varied, ways (Gáspár et al., 2024). Imagination, in this sense, becomes a disciplined capacity to engage ethically with the future.
Understanding imagination as social practice also clarifies the relationship between collective imagery and individual learning. Shared images of the future provide cultural frameworks through which individuals form expectations and role identities (Singer, 1974). At the same time, reflection, storytelling, and dialogue can reshape those images. The relationship is reciprocal: societies shape how individuals imagine the future, while individuals participate in renewing or challenging shared imaginaries through social interaction.
Slaughter’s transformation cycle (2004) helps explain how imagination evolves across individual and collective levels. Breakdowns in meaning disrupt familiar assumptions, prompting re-conceptualisation and, in some cases, the legitimation of new interpretations through institutions and cultural narratives. At the individual level, this process shapes how people make sense of their futures. At the collective level, it informs shared imaginaries that guide social direction. Within futures practice, it becomes an intentional effort to surface and reshape these dynamics. Because imagination operates across visible narratives and deeper assumptions about human nature, progress, and responsibility, approaches such as Causal Layered Analysis connect surface accounts with underlying worldviews and cultural myths. This enables learners to examine how inherited imaginaries are formed and how alternatives may emerge. Transformative myths, in this context, organise collective meaning and identity by shaping how societies interpret time, responsibility, and possibility. When dominant myths lose resonance, imagination narrows as alternatives struggle for legitimacy. Engaging and renewing these symbolic structures is therefore central to futures practice, as it expands what can be imagined and enacted.
Causal Layered Analysis: Current Realities and Transformative Futures
If the erosion of imagination is understood as a social and civilisational condition rather than an individual deficit, then it requires forms of inquiry capable of making that condition visible. Causal Layered Analysis offers such an approach by revealing how the contemporary imagination crisis in higher education is produced and sustained across interrelated layers of experience (Inayatullah, 1998, 2004, 2015, 2022.). CLA is used here to interrogate the present: to surface how policy logics, institutional structures, cultural narratives, and symbolic myths converge to narrow what can be imagined, valued, and legitimised within educational practice. This section applies CLA to examine the current realities shaping imagination in higher education, establishing the conditions from which different trajectories of change may later be explored.
CLA – Current Realities
Litany: Conditions of Constrained Imagination
At the surface level, concerns about the narrowing of imagination are widely visible. Institutional reports and public discourse highlight declining student engagement, rising anxiety, and difficulty among young people in articulating meaningful futures. Classrooms increasingly prioritise exam performance, assessment compliance, and credential accumulation, while open-ended inquiry and ethical exploration recede. Educational discourse is saturated with the language of crisis, including climate instability, employment uncertainty, and technological disruption.
Within universities, these concerns often manifest as a drift toward instrumentalism. Learning is framed in terms of employability, research is evaluated through output metrics, and institutional success is measured through rankings and performance indicators. Students are encouraged to become adaptable and resilient within futures implicitly defined by labour markets and technological change, while broader questions of social purpose, responsibility, and care fade from view (Biesta, 2015). Imagination is tolerated primarily when it appears as innovation with measurable returns.
This narrowing reflects a wider cultural condition. Contemporary societies generate abundant forecasts and scenarios yet struggle to articulate futures grounded in justice, care, and collective flourishing (Mulgan, 2020). The result is a public culture skilled at diagnosing crisis but thin in ethical vision. In educational contexts, this produces a pedagogy of disconnection in which students learn to analyse without imagining and to remember without mourning, leaving ethical memory increasingly fragile (Freire, 1970; Milojević, 2003).
Recent technological developments intensify these dynamics. Generative artificial intelligence can produce fluent and authoritative texts while lacking voice, ambiguity, and moral texture. Such outputs prioritise efficiency and recombination, reinforcing the impression that futures can be generated through automated fluency rather than through contested social meaning (Manovich, 2025). Even participatory futures activities can reproduce this compression. Workshops imagining AI caregivers or virtualised public services frequently remain anchored in existing socio-technical assumptions, offering adaptation rather than transformation (Hohendanner et al., 2024).
At the litany level, the imagination crisis is therefore experienced less as explicit prohibition than as a pervasive sense of acceleration, exhaustion, and flattening. The future appears managed, scripted, and difficult to influence.
Systemic Conditions: Incentives That Narrow Imagination
Beneath these surface symptoms lie institutional arrangements that privilege efficiency, conformity, and short time horizons. At the systemic level, the erosion of imagination is produced through governance architectures that reward measurable outputs and discourage long-horizon ethical inquiry. Universities increasingly operate within funding regimes, audit cultures, and accountability systems that prioritise performance indicators over deliberation, reflection, and futures imagination (Slaughter, 2008).
These dynamics are reinforced by what Fisher (2009) describes as capitalist realism: the pervasive sense that existing economic and institutional arrangements are not only dominant but effectively unavoidable. Within this cultural atmosphere, alternative futures appear implausible or naïve, and institutional reform is framed primarily as optimisation within existing structures rather than transformation. Universities become embedded in this logic as organisations measured through rankings, productivity indicators, and market competitiveness.
Education is therefore increasingly organised to serve labour markets. Curricula align with employer needs, industry frameworks, and inherited disciplinary structures that reproduce established assumptions about work, progress, and success. Learning becomes oriented toward credentialing and adaptation rather than imaginative or ethical inquiry. Governance structures reinforce this orientation through technocratic decision-making that emphasises data management, risk mitigation, and reputational protection.
Funding models deepen these patterns. Resources are allocated according to enrolments, publication metrics, rankings, and employability outcomes, while futures-oriented inquiry and care-centred work remain marginal. Assessment systems further standardise learning by ranking students and privileging individual performance over collaborative exploration and reflective judgement.
Within this environment, Futures Studies is often contained within existing institutional logics. Rather than opening ethical debate or questioning dominant assumptions, it is reduced to forecasting, scenario planning, or risk analysis that leaves prevailing structures largely intact. Inayatullah (2006) describes this dynamic through the concept of used futures: inherited visions that continue to shape policy and planning even after their underlying conditions have changed. Universities risk becoming receivers and replicators of externally scripted futures rather than sites of meaningful futures creation.
Galtung’s (1996) critique sharpens this diagnosis by showing how institutions can become highly skilled at analysing structural harm while rewarding diagnosis over transformation and technical explanation over ethical responsibility, thereby constraining imagination through institutional design.
Worldview and Discourse: Legitimated Ways of Knowing and Valuing
These systemic arrangements rest upon deeper assumptions about knowledge and purpose. As higher education becomes increasingly framed through a service-economy lens, students are positioned as consumers and learning becomes transactional. Universities are recast as credentialing providers rather than public institutions dedicated to knowledge, ethical reflection, and civic responsibility. This shift intensifies what Auh (2025) identifies as a quintilemma of truth, autonomy, belonging, survival, and purpose.
Within this worldview, the future is framed primarily as a technical problem to be anticipated, managed, and optimised. Knowledge is treated as neutral and transferable, detached from historical and moral context. Imagination is welcomed only when it supports innovation agendas aligned with efficiency, competitiveness, or economic growth. Uncertainty is reframed as risk rather than possibility, and futures are implicitly treated as singular trajectories driven by technological progress and market demand.
These assumptions also shape learner identity, positioning students primarily as future workers or units of human capital. Singer’s concept of the future-focused role image illustrates what is lost when education fails to support learners in imagining themselves within meaningful future roles grounded in responsibility and relationship: motivation weakens and time horizons contract (1974). This narrowing aligns with what Berardi (2011) describes as the affective condition of cognitive capitalism, where continuous informational acceleration erodes the capacity to sustain long-term imagination. Structural pressures such as precarity and competition are consequently reframed as matters of individual resilience or adaptability, a pattern Nowak (2017) identifies as characteristic of neoliberal governance.
Even futures inquiry can become constrained by these epistemic norms. Galtung observes that futures and peace studies have sometimes muted their visionary capacity in order to gain academic legitimacy (1996). Under such conditions, rigour becomes equated with detachment and prediction, while imagination is reduced to creativity in service of competitiveness (Milojević, 2002).
Myth and Metaphor: Stories That Hold the Imagination in Place
At the deepest layer, myth and metaphor organise the emotional logic of higher education, shaping what feels natural, possible, or excessive long before policies or curricula take effect. Two dominant metaphors, the Factory of Futures and the Caged Dreamer, constrain imagination by reinforcing wider cultural narratives that privilege speed, control, and technological substitution. Within these narratives, the world is framed as something to be managed, while uncertainty is reduced to risk. Contemporary imaginaries surrounding generative artificial intelligence extend this logic by suggesting that meaning, foresight, and even care can be automated, further displacing human responsibility. In Castoriadis’s (1987) terms, such metaphors carry deep cultural meanings that organise collective expectations about social life. Elise Boulding (1998) reminds us that when societies lose the capacity to imagine shared, caring, and nonviolent futures, ethical responsibility contracts. The crisis of imagination is therefore civic in nature, sustained by cultural narratives that limit what futures can be envisioned and what futures can be felt as possible.
Causal Layered Analysis -Transformative Futures
Reconstituting Imagination as a Collective and Generative Capacity
Causal Layered Analysis not only diagnoses constraint but opens pathways for transformation by showing how shifts in deeper layers of meaning can reorient educational practice and futures thinking (Inayatullah, 1998). If imagination has been narrowed through institutional structures, compressed time, and cultural narratives, it can be reconstituted by reworking the metaphors, worldviews, and systems through which education is understood. Transformation often begins with metaphor, as metaphors shape what feels possible, legitimate, and worth sustaining. In CLA, the myth and metaphor layer anchors deeper cultural narratives that sustain worldviews and engage both emotional and intellectual orientations (Inayatullah, 2004). Beginning here is therefore strategic: when underlying stories shift, corresponding changes must follow in discourse, institutional arrangements, and everyday practice, including how progress is defined and supported. Without such alignment, transformation remains rhetorical rather than material (Inayatullah et al., 2016).
Metaphors of Becoming
Renewing imagination begins with attunement. Education can be reimagined as a whispering river of becoming: slow, relational, and alive, carrying memory, emotion, and possibility through time. From this follows learning as river confluence, where learners’ stories, histories, and ways of knowing meet and flow together, widening imagination through shared navigation rather than control. This metaphor also invites education to become a sanctuary for imagination, as suggested by Marcus Bussey as cited in Abdullah (2026): a space where ideas are not immediately judged, extracted, or reduced to usefulness, and where unfinished thoughts, ambiguity, intuition, and uncertainty can remain present long enough to become meaningful. Such spaces depend on trust, openness, attentiveness, care, and reclaimed pauses for reflection, stillness, wandering thought, and grace. Futures thinking, in this sense, becomes an act of reweaving, holding continuity and transformation together so new futures can emerge from existing cultural threads. It unsettles certainty while making room for reflection, clarity, and shared recognition. These metaphors re-centre relationship, care, ethical time, and cultural responsibility, replacing enclosure with flow and speed with attentiveness, and reopening imagination as a shared capacity linking education with collective futures.
Worldview and Discourse: Relational and Ethical Futures
From these metaphors emerges a transformed worldview in which the future is an ethical and relational question. Futures are plural, provisional, and co-created, while knowledge is situated, value-laden, and shaped through dialogue, history, culture, and relationship. Imagination is understood as a core human capacity for making sense of past, present, and future, as well as a social and ecological practice formed through everyday interactions, cultural narratives, and relationships with human and non-human others. It becomes a disciplined capacity for ethical judgement, enabling learners and educators to hold uncertainty with care, recognise emerging possibilities, and remain accountable across time. As both inherited and generative, imagination is shaped by histories of inequality, dominance, and exclusion, yet retains the capacity to question and move beyond them. This shifts the educational question from generating more ideas to creating the conditions that allow diverse imaginations to live, circulate, and flourish. Uncertainty becomes a condition of becoming, while utopian thinking offers provisional direction without closure. Feminist futures scholarship foregrounds interdependence, vulnerability, and emotional labour as epistemic strengths (Milojević, 2005; Tronto, 2013), while Futures Studies makes possible, probable, and preferable futures explicit objects of inquiry (Bell, 1998, 2005). Alternative futures narratives and freedom dreaming further position imagination as agency and ethical resistance (Dator, 1998; Jones & Howard, 2024). Within this worldview, cultural citizenship becomes an active responsibility: learners and educators inherit, question, and reshape culture, positioning themselves as ethical subjects capable of linking personal becoming with structural conditions and collective responsibility (Mills, 1959).
Relational Systems for Futures Literacy
Systemic renewal requires attention to the infrastructure of imagination: the flows of resources, ideas, relationships, spaces, and practices that enable or block possibilities (Potts & Facer, 2025). These infrastructures shape whose ideas circulate, whose voices are marginalised, which narratives are reinforced, and whose futures become thinkable. Educational transformation therefore needs more than creative activities added to existing systems. It asks institutions to redesign participation, governance, assessment, classroom practice, and technology around inclusion, ethical judgement, and shared agency. Governance can move towards co-design, deliberative forums, and futures assemblies involving students, educators, and communities, making imagination part of decision-making. Assessment can shift from ranking to reflection and shared sense-making through portfolios, narrative evaluation, and co-created criteria. Classrooms can treat rationality, intuition, and imagination as connected ways of knowing. Technology can support dialogue and reflection as a companion to human judgement, while responsibility remains collective (Manovich, 2025). Since imagination is often constrained by speed, performance, and expectations of immediate usefulness, transformative education must create conditions of trust, care, pause, dialogue, and shared inquiry.
Litany: Signs of Collective Flourishing
At the surface level, these deeper shifts become visible in everyday educational life. Imagination is recognised as a core aim across disciplines, with futures literacy embedded in curricula, learning outcomes, and pedagogy. Students engage in futures thinking throughout their studies, developing the capacity to imagine alternatives, articulate values, and act with responsibility. Classrooms support dialogue, storytelling, and reflective inquiry alongside analysis, while futures-oriented research integrating ethics, care, and long-term responsibility gains institutional support.
Narratives of success also shift: insight, relational understanding, and collective visioning are valued alongside competence. Data is used not only to measure performance but to trace changes in assumptions, ethical engagement, and shared futures. Imagination thus becomes visible not as spectacle, but as a collective practice of ethical becoming.
Table 1 presents a Causal Layered Analysis linking current realities to pathways for transformative futures.
Table 1 CLA: Current Realities and Transformative Futures
| CLA Layer | Current Realities | Transformative Futures |
|---|---|---|
| Litany | Imagination is marginal or treated as optional. Futures thinking appears mainly as planning, innovation rhetoric, or employability preparation. Education prioritises speed, performance indicators, and short-term outcomes. Students experience fatigue, anxiety, and a sense that the future is externally authored. | Imagination in Futures Studies is a core aim, integrated across curricula and practice. Students learn to imagine alternatives, navigate uncertainty, and act responsibly. Classrooms prioritise dialogue, reflection, and ecological awareness, with success measured through insight, ethics, and collective visioning. Data tracks shifts in values and assumptions, making imagination a shared, lived practice. |
| Systemic | Educational systems prioritise efficiency, standardisation, and accountability. Assessment rewards predictability and compliance. Futures work is instrumentalised as risk management or forecasting. Technology is positioned as a substitute for judgement and care. Participation in decision-making is limited. | Systemic renewal reorients education around the infrastructure of imagination, cultivating futures literacy, ethical agency, and relational learning. Institutions redesign governance, curriculum, assessment, and technology, guided by Futures Studies, to support participation, reflection, narrative, and collective inquiry. Technology enables dialogue and care without replacing human responsibility. Imagination becomes integral to decision making and learning, sustained through trust, pause, and shared agency. |
| Worldview | The future is framed as a technical problem to be managed and optimised. Knowledge is treated as neutral and detached from values. Responsibility is displaced onto systems, tools, or experts. Imagination is viewed as risky, indulgent, or unserious. | Futures is understood as plural, relational, and ethically co-created. Knowledge is situated and value-laden, while imagination becomes a disciplined capacity for judgement, agency, and responsibility. Learners and educators engage uncertainty, question inherited assumptions, and participate in reshaping culture, linking personal becoming with collective futures. |
| Myth / Metaphor | The Factory of Futures frames education as a production line that converts students’ raw potential into employable graduates through standardised instruction, assessment, and credentialing. Knowledge becomes a resource to be processed efficiently, while progress is equated with speed, throughput, and economic productivity. Reflection, ethical deliberation, and responsibility are treated as delays or displaced onto systems and tools imagined as moral substitutes. Within this narrative, the future is prepared for, optimised, and engineered rather than questioned or co-created, compressing imagination into adaptation to pre-scripted futures. | Education as a whispering river of becoming, a living flow carrying memory, emotion, and possibility through time, and as a sanctuary for imagination. Learning unfolds through listening, patience, and ethical presence, where difference deepens the current rather than disrupting it. As a confluence, learners meet as tributaries whose stories and ways of knowing flow together, widening imagination through shared navigation. Here, ideas are given time to emerge, uncertainty is held with care, and agency grows through relationship, co-movement, and collective care rather than control or competition. |
| The Caged Dreamer frames learners as curious and ethically concerned, yet gradually taught to suppress imagination that cannot be assessed, monetised, or aligned with institutional priorities. Assessment regimes reward predictability, compliance, and performance, making speculative thought appear risky or indulgent. Over time, dreaming is postponed, privatised, or confined to sanctioned spaces such as innovation challenges and creativity modules, provided it serves predefined outcomes. Learners internalise these limits, separating what they care about from what they submit for evaluation. |
Imagining Educational Futures
Building on the Causal Layered Analysis above, this section shifts from diagnosis to imagination, exploring how higher education may unfold across different depths of change. Drawing on Milojević and Inayatullah’s Change Progression framework (Inayatullah, 2016; Milojević, 2005, 2011, 2023), three scenarios, marginal, adaptive, and radical, illustrate how imagination and Futures Studies might be experienced under varying conditions of transformation.
These scenarios respond to the central argument of this paper: that the erosion of social imagination in higher education is produced through institutional logics that privilege market alignment, performative metrics, and technocratic visions of the future. Rather than prescribing policy, they explore how educational life unfolds when these conditions persist, begin to shift, or are fundamentally reoriented.
Long-standing futures frameworks suggest that societies repeatedly imagine the future through recurring patterns. Dator’s Four Futures (1981a), growth, collapse, conserver, and transformation, resonate with these scenarios: marginal change reflects the continuation of growth-oriented logics; adaptive change aligns with conserver responses that recognise limits while maintaining existing structures; and radical change points toward deeper transformation in values, knowledge practices, and social purpose.
These scenarios present contrasting ways the university might be lived: as a system organised around performance and adaptation, or as a civic and ethical commons grounded in imagination, care, and collective futures-making. For education leaders, they offer lenses for reflection and action rather than predictions, supporting decisions about which futures are being reproduced, which are being enabled, and how institutional choices can expand the conditions for more just, life-affirming possibilities.
Marginal Change Scenario
Futures Studies appears intermittently as an optional enhancement rather than a core capacity. Futures literacy is framed as a tool for planning, innovation, and employability, not as an ethical or civic practice. Students encounter it through short, tool-based activities, often disconnected from lived concerns, while knowledge remains discipline-bound and instrumental, with imagination permitted only in service of predefined outcomes.
The institutional environment continues to prioritise economic expansion, technological progress, and competitive growth. Futures tools are adopted mainly to strengthen innovation, foresight, and labour market alignment, reinforcing a view of the future as an extension of the present rather than a space for transformation. Responsibility is positioned as individual adaptation within existing systems. As a result, students gain awareness of uncertainty yet remain within performance-driven cultures that frame the future as externally authored and only marginally open to influence.
Adaptive Change Scenario
Futures Studies becomes more widely integrated as a core educational capacity, supporting ethical reflection, systems awareness, and futures literacy. Students engage with futures thinking throughout their studies, linking present learning to longer-term responsibilities, while knowledge is treated as relational and situated, combining analysis with dialogue across disciplines and communities.
At the institutional level, universities begin to recognise the limits of growth-driven models. Priorities shift toward resilience, stewardship, and long-term responsibility, with learning environments fostering cooperation, ethical reflection, and care-oriented innovation. Policy frameworks increasingly acknowledge ecological limits and the need to rebalance relationships between economy, society, and environment. Responsibility for the future becomes more shared, though many institutional structures remain intact. Imagination is valued but still bounded by what is considered feasible, fundable, or acceptable. The future becomes more negotiable, yet not fully open, as systems adapt without fundamentally redefining their purpose.
Radical Change Scenario
Futures Studies becomes a foundational orientation shaping how knowledge, learning, and responsibility are understood across the university. Futures literacy, ethical imagination, and care are cultivated across disciplines, with learning experienced as relational, participatory, and futures-facing, engaging uncertainty, difference, and long-term consequence.
Universities undergo deeper transformation, moving beyond growth-driven, managerial models toward learning organised around wellbeing, ecological regeneration, and shared flourishing. Knowledge is co-created across disciplines, communities, and cultures, recognising that futures are collectively shaped rather than expert-designed.
Responsibility becomes explicitly intergenerational and ecological, with students situating themselves within longer civilisational processes rather than short-term labour markets. Imagination shifts from a peripheral capacity to a shared civic practice through which societies deliberate and commit to alternative futures. In this context, education no longer prepares individuals for existing systems but cultivates the imaginative, ethical, and relational capacities needed to navigate profound social and planetary change.
Concluding Reflection
The scenarios presented here illuminate contrasting futures for imagination in higher education while foregrounding responsibility. Each implies different roles for educators, learners, and institutions in shaping how futures are imagined and enacted. Moving from scenario to practice requires attention to positionality, where and how one teaches matters. The reflection that follows situates this analysis within my own practice as an educator and futurist, shaped by institutional constraints, ethical commitments, and a sustained effort to create space for imagination as a civic and relational capacity within the university.
Over time, I came to recognise that many young people enter higher education with limited futures literacy, often experiencing the future as distant, uncertain, or externally determined rather than something they can shape. This drew me more deeply into Futures Studies, focusing on how education might support learners to engage the future more deliberately and responsibly. Futures literacy, in this sense, is a civic and ethical capacity that enables reflection on consequences, awareness of agency within social systems, and consideration of how actions contribute to shared futures. Potts and Facer (2025) argue that the issue is not a simple lack of imagination, but whose imagination is recognised, circulated, and given authority. Imagination may be abundant, yet forms aligned with technological expansion, economic growth, and existing power structures are more readily amplified, while other ways of imagining are often marginalised.
What is needed, therefore, is a critical and creative imagination that draws on diverse lived experiences, challenges prevailing assumptions, and opens space for transformation.
My role as an educator has shifted from delivering the future to creating conditions where futures thinking becomes accessible and meaningful. I focus on helping students see the future not as something to anticipate, but as something they participate in shaping. In systems organised around speed, metrics, and predefined outcomes, my practice reopens space for reflection, dialogue, and imagination, positioning Futures Studies not as a specialised field but as a shared practice of responsibility, care, and awareness. This orientation reflects the layered analysis developed in this paper. The imagination crisis I encounter is rarely a lack of creativity; it is the narrowing of inner worlds shaped by systems that privilege speed over reflection and optimisation over ethical judgement. In my research with Taiwanese educators, this appeared as existential constraint rather than intellectual limitation. One teacher described life as “a game of chance… a lottery,” later reframing it as “kayaking down a river,” where effort is present but direction is not, concluding that “we can’t beat the system, just follow them” (Abdullah et al., 2024, p. 29). Such metaphors reveal agency reduced to motion without authorship and futures experienced as currents to endure rather than possibilities to shape. What appears as pragmatism reflects a deeper internalisation of systemic inevitability, where adaptation becomes resignation.
This quiet, normalised crisis appears through narratives of drift, fatigue, and constrained movement. It is carried through policy, governance, and the inner language people use to make sense of their lives. The images explored earlier are therefore lived realities: the factory of futures appears in pressures for efficiency and standardisation, while the caged dreamer is seen in students whose curiosity and ethical concerns are gradually narrowed by what can be assessed, monetised, or aligned with institutional priorities. Many come to feel that what they care about lies outside formal learning.
In response, my practice is not to inject creativity but to widen the frames through which futures are imagined and lived. I work against enclosure and acceleration, inviting learners into learning as river confluence, where futures unfold through shared journeys shaped by dialogue, memory, and ethical attentiveness (Abdullah, 2023a, 2023b). This approach is guided by mentors who re-centre responsibility in futures inquiry, including Richard Slaughter, Sohail Inayatullah, Ivana Milojević, Jim Dator, and Wendell Bell, whose work continues to remind me that imagination without responsibility risks becoming empty speculation. These orientations converge in my practice of feminising futures as an ethical stance rather than a fixed framework, shaping how I teach, research, and engage institutions by centring diverse voices in futures discourse and recognising care, vulnerability, and emotional labour as epistemic strengths, while expanding futures practice to foreground empathy, relationality, and ethical accountability alongside critique.
In practice, this means slowing down where systems demand speed and designing learning as a sanctuary for imagination, where silence, storytelling, emotional presence, and analysis can sit beside one another. Futures tools become invitations to ethical inquiry rather than instruments of optimisation, while students bring personal artefacts, family histories, cultural memory, and lived questions into their work, allowing imagination to emerge as relational, embodied, and shared, cultivated through trust, pause, dialogue, and collective sense-making rather than individual performance (Abdullah, 2023a, 2023b). The whispering river of becoming is therefore a way of practising: an infrastructure of imagination in which ideas can move, meet, and deepen without being immediately judged or reduced to usefulness. My role is to tend these conditions, allowing futures thinking to become an act of reweaving that holds continuity and transformation together. In a time when education narrows what can be imagined, Futures Studies reopens space for plurality, responsibility, care, and cultural citizenship, helping universities become places where futures are collectively shaped with attentiveness and commitment.
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