Utopias and science fictions in educational theory and philosophy : Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue on “Utopias and Science Fictions in Education Theory and Philosophy”, we explore the points of departure that brought these contributions together, including our Summer School in the coastal town of Gdynia (generously supported by PESGB and the European Solidarity Centre in Gdansk) where participants were given the opportunity to enact in real time utopian and speculative modes of thinking and writing on the present state of education. The Summer School was a culmination of several years of thinking together about the role, the actuality, or indeed the (im)possibility of utopias and science fictions in theorising about education, which we briefly summarise in the text. This special issue showcases how science fiction and educational theory, when placed in dialogue, can reanimate the utopian dimension of education. By experimenting with axioms, reassembling everyday utopias, and engaging in speculative fabulation, the essays collected here suggest that utopia remains vital for charting the horizons of educational thought. Within these horizons, utopian thought may no longer appear as the grand projection of modernity but persist as practices and forms of thinking and theory production, offering, just like science fiction, a mode of imagination and a way of inhabiting the present otherwise. To affirm this is not to indulge in mere fantasy, but to recognize that education itself consists in and educational theory could become an invitation to think beyond what is.

In the summer of 2024, colleagues from some 30 institutions and over a dozen national contexts gathered together for a 3-day event in Gdynia to explore the theme of “Utopias, Axioms and Science Fiction: A Quest for Educational Imaginaries” (kindly funded by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain) ¹ . Of course, this event did not appear out of nowhere but was the culmination of many months – if not years – of thinking through central questions concerning the role, the actuality, or indeed the (im)possibility of utopias in theorising about education. Throughout these 3 days – one of which took place at the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk - itself a concrete manifestation of utopia – participants attended keynote lectures delivered by three writers concerned with utopian thinking and its associated methodologies (Rhiannon Firth, Siân Bayne, Tyson Lewis). Since this was, by and large, a Summer School catering for doctoral students, participants were also invited to think through the utopian dimensions of their own doctoral projects, supported by the organisers. But perhaps the more interesting and unconventional aspect of the Summer School was our “writing laboratory”, where participants were given the opportunity to enact in real time utopian modes of writing on the present state of education.

What was it about this seemingly esoteric and purely speculative area of scholarship that brought so many diverse colleagues to the relatively small coastal city of Gdynia? Were they seeking some sense of hope in a world that seems to be characterised by perpetual crises, perhaps even some kind of ‘roadmap’ that would lead us out towards a better future? Were they fatigued by the dominant modes of thinking in philosophy of education, intrigued by the promise of something radically different?

Whilst utopianism as a concept has certainly burgeoned in recent years within the social sciences, it was at the time perhaps less visible in the field of philosophy of education (e.g. Alberro et al., 2024; Firth 2012). In this sense, the Summer School was the first step in an ongoing discussion that sought to signpost the inevitable ways in which utopianism underpins philosophical theory on/through education. But for those who may have been seeking a roadmap out of the current state of education into an idealised future, the Summer School was likely to disappoint. For the kind of utopianism that concerned us was not simply a naive reckoning for a future that will never arrive – a reckoning that might, ironically, require some level of dystopic, totalitarian control - but instead, to enact what Cooper (2014: 3) calls a “form of attunement, a way of engaging with spaces, objects, and practices” in the here and now. This is a utopianism that is no doubt “oriented to the hope, desire, and belief in the possibility of other, better worlds” (Cooper, 2014: 3), but it is also one that sits within the latency of the present and the tendencies of this future-oriented thinking. What we sought to enact was a utopianism that evokes not simply some absurd fantasy about the future but “a form of creative and productive thinking” (Harten, 2004: 1078), a thought experiment that seeks to articulate what it might mean to exist within this threshold between utopian intention and its actualisation (Bloch, 2000). In other words, our aim was to consider the possibility of utopianism as a mode of thinking about the present of education, and our writing laboratories in particular sought to think through what putting these considerations into writing might look like.

On the first day, we asked participants in groups to begin to formulate a ‘speculative fabulation’ on this theme, a writing practice that, we hoped, would lead to the production of new stories, new narrative arrangements and entanglements, new perceptual capacities, and indeed, new ways of relating to the world we currently and collectively inhabit. Such modes of writing require, on the one hand, what Le Guin (2017: 87) calls “a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift.” And yet, in a field that is so heavily oriented towards normative and/or critical argumentation about the future of education, this mode of thinking is radically unsettling. Indeed, partly because so many of us are so entrenched within the critical discourses of academic scholarship (Brady, 2024), it would be remiss to suggest that the act of speculating in a way that resists purely future- or deconstructive modes of thought was universally successful. Participants worried they weren’t “doing it right” - ‘it’ being in one sense the act of writing philosophically in an educational domain. Organisers, too, wondered about how to evaluate what “doing it right” actually meant. Of course, “doing it right” presupposes particular success conditions, and wasn’t the very nature of the experiment to avoid this on some level? To put something into action and see where it might lead, to see what surreptitious connections might be formulated, and to embrace the labyrinthine possibilities that emerge from a concrete, albeit somewhat nebulous, starting point?

The event was indeed an experiment – one that was not bound to succeed by any means, one in which failure would not simply be overcome in light of lessons learned. It was an experiment that came with no pre-determined cartography, with no routes towards the future clearly mapped out in advance. But it was, to use the language of utopian discourse, prefigurative and intentional. It required participants to play with new imaginaries in conceptualising education as it currently stands, perhaps on some level a form of social dreaming that interrupts the ubiquitous critical discourse and that allows for the routinising of new modes of thinking that attend to the here and now. This is a mode of writing that is both immanent and propulsive, that seeks to encapsulate an “ever-born movement towards something indeterminate” (Abensour, 2008: 407), and that relies on “improvisation... understood... in the etymological sense as the ‘unforeseen’, or rather, as existing within the process of ‘foreseeing’ that which remains elusive and yet imaginable in the present.” (Brady, 2025).

The hope, of course, is that such modes of thinking can be taken forward by participants in their future academic work. This special issue, put together collectively over long discussions (in-person but, of course, also aided by the existence of video-calling technologies) demonstrates a range of authors who have taken similar approaches in their thinking, and who showcase the possibility of a new mode of writing that encapsulates this “spirit” (Bloch, 2000) of utopian thought in its various forms.

Although it had not been originally planned, the fact that 1 day of the Doctoral Summer School took place in the Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk may be read, with the benefit of hindsight, as highly illustrative of a deeper layer of the project in the first place, and of this special issue now. Indeed, while it would be foolish to condense in a few words the significance of the Solidarity movement in Poland and of the Solidarity Centre as its “objective correlate” (to adapt a phrase of T.S. Eliot), it is perhaps not far-fetched to state that one of the themes in the museum is the history of the liberation from communism as “the God that failed” (Crossman, 1949).

The narrative that unfolds through the exhibits in the Solidarity Centre starts with the protests at the Gdańsk Shipyards and culminates with the collapse of the communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. Without indulging in any historical analysis of these events, what is noteworthy is that the narrative exhibited within the Solidarity Center also represents the story of the delusions of utopia construed as the blueprint for the perfect society. In this sense, the “year of the miracles” (Latour 1993: 8), 1989, ushered (many areas of) the world into the illusion of the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992), ultimately amounting to a celebration of the neoliberal status quo and the establishment of the TINA (There Is No Alternative) mindset. Thus, the failure of one specific understanding of utopia (as a blueprint) reverberated into an abandonment of utopia in general, particularly insofar as it might be understood as a kind of thinking inevitably conducive to violence (Popper, 2002) or, at best, to groundless daydreaming.

Indeed, the alleged victory of the neoliberal order seemed to throw utopian thinking into disrepute. Or, to put it differently and perhaps more accurately: once the narrative of the end of history is obtained, there seemed to remain no role and no room for utopia as the endeavour to think of the course of history differently – namely, as a way of thinking that is both critical of the status quo and that constructs or that gives prospects for unthought possibilities.

One could argue that neoliberalism itself has taken on some quasi-utopian features, however, if only by presenting itself as a sort of “salvation story”, related to “the hope of free-market neoliberalism”, to quote Thomas Popkewitz (2008: 118) in relation the hegemonic vocabulary of lifelong learning. In his ingenious analysis, he argues that “the cultural thesis of the lifelong learner [refers to a] mode of life [that] is problem solving in a continual process of innovation in diverse communities. […] Progress is tied to the micro-governing of life that has multiple dimensions of time—time of a regulated life, time of living in different communities, where there are processes of continuous innovation, and the comprehension associated with the Internet and multitasking” (pp. 115–117). In this view, “[p]roblem solving is a particular salvation story that considers life to be a series of rational ordered paths for finding solutions that is never complete and always defers the present to the future” (p. 118).

But this future is never utopian in the sense of offering the vision of a radically different horizon of meaning. Rather, it is ‘merely’ the fine-tuning of the one and only story: over and over again, there is no alternative. The cultural thesis of lifelong learning and what Pasi Sahlberg (2016) has forcefully dubbed GERM (Global Educational Reform Movement) has therefore resulted in a drastic reduction of the educational imaginaries in light of utopian thinking.

Without delving further into the argumentations of Popkewitz, these ideas indicate one of the ways in which the utopian discourse within educational theory has been reduced. And this is all the more significant as – at least in some educational traditions (e.g. the German and the Italian) – utopia has been considered as a structural and non-ancillary element of educational theorizing, at least in modern times (see Oliverio and Zamojski, 2025).

Let us be clear: we are not intimating that the caesura of 1989 has eliminated any utopian thinking in educational theory. If human rights have been “the last utopia” (Moyn, 2010), one could consider the emergence of the paradigm of education for human rights as a kind of morphing of the “utopian vector” in education theory. At the same time, what Gianni Vattimo (2000) defined as “the liberation of differences, of the local elements, of what we could call, upon the whole, dialect” (p. 17) has powerfully contributed to feeding educational imaginaries. And yet, perhaps also in the wake of the mistrust for grand narratives and for utopia as a blueprint, utopian thinking seems to have receded into the background.

This may be only part of the story. Indeed, the cultural thesis of lifelong learning has maintained a strong emphasis on the idea of progress, which, as suggested by Jurgen Oelkers (1992), went hand in hand with that of utopia in modern educational theorizing (at least in the German and part of the Continental tradition). In this sense, it can come as no surprise that that thesis took on also the aforementioned quasi-utopian features. Instead, what happens if it is the very notion of progress that is put in discussion, if the future is no longer a territory to conquer but a land—indeed, an Earth—to preserve in its very possibility of existence? If, in Latour’s (1993) words, “[i]n Paris, London and Amsterdam, this same glorious year 1989 witnesses the first conferences on the global state of the planet” (p. 8), has this dawning awareness of a future at risk and of “catastrophic times” (Stengers, 2015) made utopia an untimely mindset, in the most commonsense meaning of the word untimely? Has not utopia been accomplice to that fatal bifurcation of culture and nature and with a humanism run mad?

If this may be the case with the ‘substantial’ view of utopias (viz., construed as the blueprint of the future and perfect society), it is moot whether we are called upon to jettison utopia as a method (Levitas, 2013) and a style of thinking. On the contrary, it can be argued that precisely the need for new understandings of what association as opposed to society is (Latour, 2007) has encouraged us to cultivate new imaginaries (see, for instance, Felton 2025).

While we are completing these introductory lines (January 2026), the Great Regression (Geiselberger, 2017) that has been going on for at least the last decade has gained new momentum and may have brought to a definitive end the period beginning in 1989; the need for “a utopia of utopia” (Oelkers, 1990: 1) may have become, therefore, even more urgent.

The essays in this special issue take such tensions as a point of departure. They explore whether utopia is a merely contingent feature of modern educational discourse or a constitutive dimension of educational thinking qua educational. Does the eclipse of modernity entail the eclipse of utopia, or can utopian thought still animate education in new and different ways? Either aiming to revive the grand projects of emancipation that defined early modern utopian thinking or putting a non-modern spin to it, the contributions suggest that a re (dis)covery of utopia is possible—perhaps by acknowledging both its historical exhaustion and continuing necessity.

In one sense, utopia has often been understood as a critical tool (Webb, 2025). It provides a standpoint from which to denounce the shortcomings of existing arrangements, while projecting an image of emancipation beyond them. In contrast, post-critical pedagogy (Hodgson et al., 2018), following Berlant’s (2011) analyses of cruel optimism, has proposed that hope in the present may be at least as important as critique of the present. Utopia, then, need not be only a vision of a better future; it might also be a practice of reconfiguring the present, of inhabiting assumptions that transform reality when treated as true. The conception of utopia throughout this special issue is less concerned with a blueprint than a mode of experimentation and imagination that unsettles the given and rehearses the possible (Oliverio and Zamojski, 2025).

This sense of unsettling can also be seen in dystopian narratives, which, as Brady (2025) argues, can also paradoxically posit a utopian mode of thought. A concrete demonstration of this can be found in many science fiction narratives. Indeed, in presenting of dystopic futures, such narratives also surreptitiously point to something radically utopian as a way of re-organising life, provoking questions in regard to who might be included in such considerations (Felton, 2025). Following Donna Haraway (2016), science fiction can be understood as speculative fabulation: a mode of storytelling that takes the dilemmas of the present and stretches them into possible futures (Ruff and Wortmann, 2025). In doing so, it offers a repertoire of thought experiments that are deeply educational. The literary canon of speculative fiction—from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—has long been engaged with questions of subject formation, governance, and inter-generational relations. But speculative fabulation is not confined to literature. Works such as A.S. Neill’s Summerhill or John Dewey’s My Pedagogic Creed may also be read as educational utopias, fabulating worlds that do not yet exist but that are thinkable through narrative.

Engaging with science fiction in this way suggests that narrative and imagination are not simply embellishments to educational theory, but modes of theorizing in their own right. Speculative fabulation has the potential to become a form of educational thought that does not aim to solve problems once and for all, but to linger with them, to assemble unlikely connections, and to learn to see otherwise. To bring science fiction and educational theory together is therefore not necessarily to collapse the difference between fiction and philosophy, but to recognize the ways both reciprocally can experiment with their potential.

Several other conceptual resources orient the contributions to this special issue - for instance, Jacques Rancière’s (1991) notion of the axiom, exemplified by Joseph Jacotot’s pedagogical experiment with the “equality of intelligences” (Snir, 2025). When treated as an axiom, its assumption generates results that seem impossible, namely equality. Acting as if such an assumption were true could itself be seen as a practice of utopia, one that makes utopia real in the present. Another conceptual resource is Davina Cooper’s (2014) idea of everyday utopias, which shifts attention from grand schemes to modest, situated practices that embody alternative possibilities in contingent ways. These initiatives are fragile and partial, but precisely for that reason they matter: They enact hope in the present rather than only in an imagined future.

What unites these approaches is an attempt to think utopia beyond critique. They suggest that utopia does not need to be abandoned along with the modern ideal of progress, but can be reinvented as a form of educational imagination. This reinvention is not about reclaiming the certainty of future emancipation; it is about cultivating the capacity to speculate, to fabulate, and to inhabit the impossible here and now. The essays collected here explore these possibilities in different ways, whether by re-examining the historical coordinates of utopian thought within educational discourse, or what might be called the ‘architectural’ dimensions of utopia hitherto under-considered, as Lewis (2025) showcases. Or indeed, by bringing speculative fiction into conversation with pedagogy, or by experimenting with post-critical orientations that locate utopia in the practices of the present.

Taken together, the contributions to this special issue complicate any simple opposition between utopia and realism, between critique and post-critique, or between education as an instrumental practice and education as an end in itself. They highlight how utopia functions not only as a vision of the future but also as a generative mode of thinking in the present. To exclude utopia from educational theory is to risk reducing education to administration and technique, to the management of learning stripped of imagination. To include it, by contrast, is to acknowledge that education is always already oriented toward possibilities that exceed the given.

The wager of this special issue is that science fiction and educational theory, when placed in dialogue, can reanimate the utopian dimension of education. By experimenting with axioms, reassembling everyday utopias, and engaging in speculative fabulation, the essays collected here suggest that utopia remains vital for charting the horizons of educational thought. Within these horizons, utopian thought may no longer appear as the grand projection of modernity but persist as practices and forms of thinking and theory production, offering, just like Science Fiction, a mode of imagination and a way of inhabiting the present otherwise. To affirm this is not to indulge in mere fantasy, but to recognize that education itself consists in and educational theory could become an invitation to think beyond what is.