19. Imagination and justice: Teaching the future(s) of higher education through Africanfuturist speculative fiction

Abstract

How might inclusion, equity, justice, care and sustainability be set to glimmer in higher education? This chapter draws on educational theory, critical research, and storytelling - in particular Africanfuturist science fiction - to dream new educational interfaces that are oriented for good. The chapter first maps out a 15 week course where students study the Africanfuturist science fiction novella Binti before writing their own storied futures for higher education in response. In the second half of the chapter another voice takes up the pen to imagine they are a student taking the course, and thus speculatively enact it. The chapter aims to open spaces for students and lecturers to: reflect on their (our) own positions in the academy, to critique the reproduction of classed, raced, gendered inequities in higher education through the encroachments of automation and platformisation, but then to generate futures that are oriented to justice.