Abstract
In this essay, we describe a project that asks students to edit and contribute to a collaborative “Futures Glossary” across two undergraduate media studies courses about the future and futurisms. Both courses focus on critique and critical creative practice; that is, they require students to actively imagine various futures using words and images, while also considering theories of technology. Our glossary asks students to work as editors, curators, and contributors. The whole point is the doing of these things, not the end result—the glossary itself is a space for practice that also centers practices. We situate our project first as an intervention in the instrumentalization of the university as an institution, then in terms of other glossary projects. We then establish the keywording aspect of our project as a utopian practice that befits a class on futures, and we establish the artistic aspect as part of ongoing conversations about collective imagination work, especially Afro- and indigenous futurisms. Finally, we describe how the project works in our classrooms and offer some preliminary examples of work-in-progress.
Keywords
Educators are like artists in so far as it is the teacher facilitator’s job to make experiences available to students that give them a stake in the world as it is coming to be. (Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience, 2002: p. 207)
Introduction
We started talking about this project at a party. One of us said, “you and I should talk; we teach the same thing,” and the other one said, “yeah, and then we should write a textbook together! But I want it to be a textbook that works like Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit (see Ono and Lennon, 2000).” There was wine involved, also mushrooms. Deciding to embark on a book project is much less daunting when altered states are involved. In the post-party sobriety, we both had second thoughts about diving into a book proposal, but we were going to be friends now, and we wanted to work together. So we sat down in a coffee shop and made a plan to work on something. We talked about the books and readings we assigned. We thought maybe some kind of shared resource between our classes. We wanted the students to be involved in the act of creation. We made a list called “Some Ethos Notes”: SOME ETHOS NOTES explicitly not profit-oriented, no business plans allowed divest/degrow/refuse reject markets/speculation as the frame for futures make it not (always) digital students should draw and play and collaborate f2f playful/artful/poetic
As we tried to think of a first concrete step to start real work, our respective classes seemed like a natural fit. We both teach courses on futurisms, one course in creative nonfiction and one course in visual studies, in different programs that share a hallway. We had already taught these courses; we just had to make sure that they could run again, concurrently in the upcoming semester. Approval secured, we began to imagine our two classes, normally siloed in their own departments, collaborating on a glossary for the future. There was no precedent for this, at least in our departments. We knew from the start that we wanted to focus on the act of creation—that is, the process of working with students to generate a glossary, rather than presenting them with already formed concepts. We wanted to preserve the initial playfulness of our idea about a Grapefruit textbook, and we wanted to get students to think seriously about how collective work in a university classroom could be a model for the future—some strange blend of Grapefruit and Glossary.
Here we describe the project as we have begun teaching it. It asks students to edit and contribute to a collaborative “Futures Glossary” across our two undergraduate media studies courses about the future and futurisms. Both courses focus on critique and critical creative practice; that is, they require students to actively imagine various futures using words and images, while also considering theories of technology. Our glossary asks students to work as editors, curators, and contributors. The whole point is the doing of these things, not the end result—the glossary itself is a space for practice that also centers practices. In the pages that follow, we situate our project first as an intervention in the instrumentalization of the University as an institution, then in terms of other glossary projects, and as media practice. We then establish the keywording aspect of our project as a utopian pedagogy that befits a class on futures, and we establish the artistic aspect as part of ongoing conversations about collective imagination work and speculative practice, especially in Afro- and indigenous futurisms. Finally, we describe how the project works in our classrooms and offer some examples of the work-always-in-progress. We see this project as contributing to a media-informed theory of utopian pedagogy, one attempt among many to reclaim the university classroom space for utopia.
Resisting the productivity-oriented university
A university classroom, in 2026, can feel like it’s a long way from utopia. The moment we’re writing in is marked by climate crisis, alienation, political impotence, and an encroaching sense of higher education as a product for sale, with students as both consumers and raw material, depending on how you look at it (see Harney and Moten, 2013). Universities, as institutions in a world run by corporations, have become obsessed with “industry-standard deliverables” in the form of products, skills, and professionalized students. Humanities departments are being cut or downsized. In the classroom, over-hyped Large Learning Model (LLM) AI technology has led to claims that the essay is dead, and a future in which students don’t write or do research—they just query—seems to loom. AI is monopolizing the conversation in a use it-or-perish binary, so it would seem that the future has already been decided for us by a Silicon Valley-Academia nexus, and it is not one we relish. The classroom itself is one of the last spaces for face-to-face discussion, but, post-pandemic, even the classroom has been hijacked by Zoom and the black squares of online learning. The classroom, in this context, tends to become a space for reproducing more of what already is, with educators and students alike resigned to a future they have no say in. We feel this at our campus constantly; our students are under pressure to succeed and be productive, and they are already taught to translate classroom performance to success in industry.
We find this tendency to productivism antithetical to a critical pedagogy in the humanities, and in media studies, especially. Media are the means by which we perceive and produce our worlds. A media studies classroom—and a course on the future, at that—should be a space where we actively cocreate and redesign our worlds’ futures. We need classrooms that invite student autonomy and creativity and attribute intellectual “rigor” to those things—autonomy and creativity (attention to presence, participation, and process)—rather than productivity (attention to a finished product). The impingement of AI on the classroom and the ease with which answers—right, wrong, or hallucinatory—can be found, perpetuates the friction-free demands of always-on digital capitalism. Students are lured into getting to the product as quickly and efficiently as possible. How do we then put the brakes on the product and emphasize the process?
To answer this question, we turn to critical pedagogy in the legacy of Paolo Freire and to Ursula Franklin’s media pedagogy. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire and Macedo (2014) exhorts teachers to adopt liberatory pedagogy that refuses “models from among the oppressors” (p. 47). In late capitalism, education that takes the oppressors’ models looks like Fred Moten’s idea of the University as a neoliberalized Commons, the product-oriented arrangement we describe above. Stefano Harney and Moten (2013) offer a vision of a resistant Undercommons sustained by speculative practice. Antonia Darder, a student of Freire’s, ties critical pedagogy directly to media practice (in her case, radio). Darder’s consideration of community radio as public pedagogy sounds like what Yochai Benkler (2019) calls commons-based peer production: “academic ‘success’” Darder (2011) writes, “is no longer attached to the material ambitions of individuals and their contribution to bolstering capitalist democracy; rather, it is linked to generating academic resources and technical skills that can be shared and utilized in the collective interest of community solidarity and democratic participation” (p.703). A media-informed utopian pedagogy must function in the way that Darder describes. The media practices we teach in the glossary project see media as a means for interpersonal connection, communal study, and collective imagination that grows out our present circumstances.
Ursula Franklin’s “technology as practice” (1999) offers us a workable media pedagogy and a holistic approach to learning and thinking that rejects the now dominant production model where the student is a “specifiable and identifiable product” (p. 22). We had both already been thinking and writing about Franklin. Her work helped one of us bring some much-needed self-reflection to online teaching during the pandemic (Logan, 2022), and the other to include poetic holisms in an activity for a rhetoric of science class (Maddalena, 2022). Teaching and learning, writes Franklin, cannot be measured, quantified and packaged—it is a holistic process that attunes to the context of student learning. Following Franklin, we asked that our students’ keywords for the glossary be cultural or technological (i.e., mediated) practices, a way of doing something. We chose this approach because it turns our attention away from technologies as objects and artefacts and towards technologies as media that produce actions in context. We were giving students the space to imagine ways of doing and being that they wanted to continue into the future (or, alternatively, that they hoped would not be a part of the future). The playful, artistic aspect of the project could lend itself to practice-orientation, as well. In describing her wearable art piece, Jingle Boots, Maria Hupfield says, “I sometimes think the object is the excuse for the interaction” (qtd. In Chaisson, 2025). Art and poetics could help with a Franklinian re-orientation to technology. We wanted students to begin thinking of objects as artful, playful, even ceremonial—as ways of seeing, ways of being, not merely instrumental ways of producing.
By actively developing a futurisms lexicon within the structure of a collaborative medium, students learn to theorize. By prompting creative work that playfully engages that lexicon, students learn what a speculative media practice can look like. By collaborating with each other and us, they come to understand language as theory-in-action, a living vocabulary that can be edited, annotated, and amended. As a result, students begin to find ways to think the future outside of existing determinisms and hype: the technological object, technological progress, utopic/dystopic binaries, speculation, disaster, extinction, effective altruisms, and the like. They also begin to see the classroom as a space of communal study—“what you do with people… talking, walking, working, dancing” (Harney and Moten, 2013, p.110)—rather than a space of neoliberal productivity. In the context of the lexicon, technology as practice works on two levels: one, the keywords themselves will be cultural and technological practices, not theoretical concepts, and; two, keywording (Highmore, 2022) is a practice with which students and teachers work and play at together developing over the course of a semester.
Glossaries and the pedagogy of keywording
Raymond Williams’s Keywords (1976/1985), the foundational work for lexicons within media and communication studies, began as a pedagogical project during Williams’s tenure as an adult educator after the Second World War and up until 1961. When Williams returned to Cambridge from the army he found a changed world from the one he had previously known: “the fact is, they just don’t speak the same language,” he remarked to a friend who had also been in the war (p. 11). The word that he found so divisive in this context was culture and it became the jumping-off point for exploring the meanings of different words—art, democracy, industry—in his adult education classes. Williams made no grand claims for the work of his Keywords: better understanding the contested meanings of class will not resolve the class struggle. Rather, Keywords (1976/1985) offers “just that extra edge of consciousness,” the edge being the space beyond hegemonic meanings (p. 24). Here is the utopian impulse in Keywords (1976/1985) that we are especially attracted to: “a vocabulary to use, to find our own ways in, to change as we find it necessary to change it…” (pp. 24-25).
The cultural theorist Ben Highmore (2022) calls attention to the pedagogic function of Keywords where entries from Williams’s text are used as a basis for seminar discussion. He names this practice keywording, a way of “attuning students” to the practices of Cultural Studies where “negotiation and struggle matter more than the surety of an immobile position” (p. 876). Quoting Williams, Highmore sees keywording as providing “resources for hope” for the way that the process not only describes the world, but makes “aspects of it newly visible and thereby open to challenge and change” (p. 877). Although we might readily assign excerpts from Keywords to our students or other similar publications, we suggest pushing the pedagogical function keywording a step further: having students themselves come up with the keywords and guiding and facilitating their own creation of entries. Keywording then becomes not just an analytic practice, but a creative and critical practice in keeping with Highmore’s own critique of Williams’s use of the OED. It was the main source for his keywords, and Highmore argues that it belies Williams’ own attention to social experience, and the conflict and struggle that defines meaning-making both historically and for future thinking; the authors of a revised version of Keywords also call attention to the “cultural biases” of the OED (Bennett et al., 2005). How to account for the “heteroglot” dimension of words and the “dynamic environment” that is language (Highmore 2022: pp. 884-5)? Highmore (2022) has four suggestions, and we think these are central to any collaborative keyword project: placing emphasis on the interdisciplinary and experimental modes over literary, drawing on all forms of media, not just texts, “widening the voices” of those who get to contribute (see Taylor, 2023 on “cofuturisms”), and paying attention to material culture, which is especially relevant in media studies (p. 889). We also see no reason why the process of keywording needs to be limited to historical analysis, nor do we think that educators should be the ones even choosing the keywords. In Highmore’s scenario, the instructor determines which keywords will be discussed in the seminar. In many of the works discussed here, the academics choose the keywords based on their area of expertise. Our proposal pushes this: If Williams’s claim still applies—they don’t speak the same language, in this case referring to our students—then it almost demands that we make keywording a collective endeavor, letting the students choose the keywords.
Our glossary builds on existing lexicons in the way that it is both collective and critical; they evince a utopianism that is as much about process as form and content. For example, in the Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization, Parker, Fournier, and Reedy (2007) treat their key concept—organization—as a verb, connecting utopia to the way our everyday activities, like learning, are organized under free market liberalism, and not about the institutions per se. Following the work of Ruth Levitas (2013) they see utopia “in terms of its critical, transgressive and transformative functions rather than in terms of its particular form or content” (Parker et al., 2007, p. x). Levitas (2013) sees imagination as a practice, so that the act of imagination itself, the organization of something, takes priority over the thing imagined. This has been a guiding logic in the way we see the glossary, as an organization and a practice that seeks to take back both space and time from the organizational principles of the neoliberal university: how we organize our classrooms, our assignments, and discussions with undergraduate students. Because of this orientation to space and time, the goal of our Futures Glossary is not to form new words and concepts, nor create a finished document that takes stock of existing scholarship, and which then can become something that can be cited by others (e.g. (Hlavajova and Braidotti, 2018) and (Braidotti et al., 2023). We think of the glossary itself as an act of creativity, particularly at a moment when the essay has become anachronistic, and AI hype increasingly impinges on the general psyche of the classroom.
The act of creativity, then, is about creating the space and time in the classroom to explore common ways of being and doing in the world. Speculations: the future is_____ (2015) was not a keyword project, but the publication that emerged out of it acts as a lexicon and finding aid for the extensive online archive of presentations (the summer of lectures and discussions at MOMA PS1 in 2012). In choosing the glossary as a genre for the publication, the editor, Sarah Resnick (2015), writes that “the lexicon underlies the common language that we cannot but use in speaking about the future” (p. 24). This makes any project on the future as much about the present as it is about imagining the future. The future is only as good as our language in the present, and so any exploration of the future is simultaneously an exploration of present constraints and imaginaries: “identifying and scrutinizing the language we use to speak about the future can also elucidate our present, and describe the conditions under which we attempt to remake the world” (Resnick, 2105: p. 24). One recent contribution to the glossary genre is the series “‘No Future’: A Lexicon” (Radney, 2025). This lexicon-in-progress draws hope through language, offering a “set of keywords for conceptualizing, resisting, rejecting, and confounding the futures on offer” (Wolf-Meyer, n.p.). Here “no future” works on a couple of levels: not only is the climate future entirely grim, but the futures, both past and present, have rarely come to pass as predicted, and they are often the visions of the most powerful and rarely reflect the everyday needs of people, those who struggle to find a safe place to sleep, enough to eat, and a cool place to escape the heat.
In a 1965 prospectus for Future Shock, Alvin Toffler proposed a chapter on a “curriculum of the future,” that would by publication time become the chapter “Education in the Future Tense.” In that chapter, Toffler (Toffler, 1970, pp. 466-7) writes: “We need...a revolution in the production of utopias: collaborative utopianism. We need to construct ‘utopia factories’.” Toffler taught a course on the “Sociology of the Future” at the New School in the late 1960s, and like both Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams, he saw the industrial model of education as the one-way transmission of knowledge from teachers to students outdated. Like Williams, though, Toffler’s (1970) approach was top-down, as he imagined a “small group of top social scientists” (p. 467) making predictions and prognostications. Still, he explicitly suggests bringing future thinking into the classroom in other less instrumental ways.
To Williams’s credit, he includes blank pages at the back of Keywords (1976/1985, p.26) for “Reader’s Notes,” “a sign that the inquiry remains open….In the use of our common language, in so important an area, this is the only spirit in which this work can be properly done.” With our glossary, we hope to center the action of writing on and talking about those blank pages. Williams and Toffler could not be the endpoint as the future thinking of their time was predominately male and white and proffered a universality that our students would not be able to relate to. Building on the call for collaborative utopianism together with keywording, we turned to Afro- and Indigenous futurisms and the Fluxus art movement to emphasize the multitude of ways that “future thinking” can be imagined and depicted, and to give students the power to create, to give them a voice that theorizes, speculates and experiments, not one that just follows assignment instructions. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2014, p.7) writes that “theory isn’t just for academics; it’s for everyone. And so, the story of maple sugar gets told to (some of) our kids almost from birth. ‘Theory’ within [the Nishnaabeg] context is generated from the ground up and its power stems from its living resonance within individuals and collectives. Younger citizens might first understand just the literal meaning. As they grow, they can put together the conceptual meaning, and with more experience with our knowledge system, the metaphorical meaning.” As we ask students to critique and reformulate a practice, we take this approach to theory—it grows from contextualized practice. Ideally, according to the tenets of critical pedagogy, students’ emergent theory also informs their approach to the assignment, the course, and other communal endeavors in their lives. As Freire writes: “[t]heory must orient action. Otherwise it is empty” (p.49).
Students might expect a class about the future to center around scenario-building and research-driven predictions. At the beginning of the course, we had students read “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” by Marc Andreessen (2023) and Yochai Benkler’s (2019) analysis of Wikipedia as commons-based peer production, “From Utopia to Practice and Back.” These two perspectives—one from a venture-capitalist billionaire and one from a scholar of law and information technology—both offer optimistic frames for media technology as a key to the future. Both perspectives were compelling to our students looking for alternatives to the dystopic media visions with which they have grown up. Benkler’s treatment of Wikipedia gives students an example of a high-profile and thriving utopic (though imperfect) media practice in the midst of late capitalism. Wikipedia’s example, and Benkler’s framework for the new media commons, helps them identify the utopic ethos of our glossary project and the utopic elements of their chosen practices. We should note that we treat Wikipedia as an example of concrete utopic practice, since Benkler and others have noted issues in its governance and editing that belie its professed value of consensus (Jankowski et al., 2025: p. 2). A similar issue—a power hierarchy—is at play in our classes, given that we ourselves are authority figures in the space, and the glossary is an assignment.
A utopic space oriented to present futures neither reproduces the status quo, nor biases towards despair, nihilism, and dystopia. It also doesn’t see technology as an attractive excuse to leave people and the Earth behind: the zero-carbon society of 2040 or the permanent nuclear winter that may occur in the same year. Informed by utopic methods, we know that prediction often leads to uncritical optimism and/or despair. And informed by perspectives in Afro- and Indigenous futurisms, we also know that the world has already ended more than once in the past; dystopia, like utopia, is not reserved for a future space and time. Prediction and prognostication as an institutionalized endeavor emerged in the wake of World War II and the potential for nuclear planetary annihilation: In his work on Herman Kahn, Peter Galison (2014, p.45) writes that “the modern scenario of the future was born and, in some sense, remained in the shadow of nuclear cataclysm.” McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) is filled with predictions about the future. So how can our classes on possible futures and writing futures escape prediction, prognostication and future scenarios while also channeling our students’ desire for optimism amidst both the end-of-the-world discourses and the unbridled technological optimism that dominate popular culture? For this, we turn to utopia as a method, and glossary as a media architecture.
In Utopia as Method, Ruth Levitas (2013, p. 281) describes utopia as “a particular kind of scenario-building that not only combines existential and institutional levels, but maintains a double standpoint between present and future. It sustains the tension between these, re-reading the present from the standpoint of the future, transforming it into the history of the future. Present futures are a way of foreclosing or opening future presents, and the utopian mode straddles this tension more effectively than prediction or forecasting.” Levitas also describes utopia as a kind of “architecture,” or “blueprint” for a social way of being. The medium of the glossary serves as a simple architecture for a utopic endeavor. The glossary allows for conversation, contestation, and revision. Our glossary affords these actions as well as the social action of imagining otherwise in the form of entry design (structure) and concept-building (theoretical work, content), extension to other communities and conversations (references and external links), and iteration through future edits and contributions (an always unfinished medium). The use of a familiar, conventional media form (the glossary) in an equally familiar, institutional space (the classroom) is a form of what Gary Wilder (2022, p.9) calls “concrete utopianism”: a “[possibility] for alternative arrangements that may already dwell within, or be emerging from, the nonidentical order that already exists.” Even as the glossary is created within existing institutional arrangements—the university, the tuition-paying student, contract labor—like Wikipedia, which exists as utopic practice in a sea of commercialism, we envision the lexicon and the classroom as spaces for practices of utopian media studies within the broader neoliberal university.
Collective imagination work: Pedagogies of art as inquiry
Along with keywording, the second requirement of our glossary is that students invite each other to collaborate by submitting creative contributions to each entry. This feature, a counterbalance to the more prosaic and research-based written entry, is inspired by work in Fluxus pedagogy, Afro- and indigenous futurisms, and other work that calls for collective imagination (see Cairns, 2025) in higher education. In the 1960s and 70s, the famous and mysterious post-conceptual art movement Fluxus coalesced around an “anthology,” Fluxus I, a book of contributions from artists working in the mode. Fluxus’s most consistent genre is the “score” (which also evolved into “happenings” and “Fluxkits”)—a poem-like set of instructions that requires imagination and action from the viewer. One of our favorite examples of this is Nam June Paik’s interpretation of a score by LaMonte Young. Young’s score says very simply, “Draw a straight line and follow it.” Paik’s 1961 piece, called “Zen for Head,” involved Paik using his head as a paintbrush, dipping his hair into a pot of ink, and dragging his head in a straight line across a piece of parchment on the ground. Fluxus-type work, then, depends upon active collaboration at two points: the anthology is built from the contributions of multiple artists, and then if the work itself is to become something more concrete in the world, another collaborator must act on the first artist’s score.
Fluxus’s collective methodology and playful insouciance make it a compelling model for creative student work. The final chapter of art historian Hannah Higgins book, Fluxus Experience, is titled “Towards a Fluxus-inspired pedagogy,” and it recommends the uptake of Fluxus-style inquiry in university pedagogy as a way to actively critique and resist the reproduction of unself-critical, humorless, and therefore lifeless academic work in the classroom, making it a “utopian space of hopefulness” (p. 81). Gino Dimaggio, a collector devoted to preserving and publicizing a large archive of Fluxus ephemera, says that “Fluxus arises as a reaction, as a renunciation and as a rejection of a reality that is the reality of superindustrialization, superexploitation, superconsumerism, superimperialism” (qtd. In Higgins, p.177). One example of such a project is D. Graham Burnett et al.’s mysterious internet red-herring vendors, ESTAR/SER and The Order of the Third Bird, a cool group of academics who scatter art objects and Fluxus-like happenings among the scholarly products of their serious CVs—a wink to the fact that all is artifice and that academic work may truly be play (see Burnett, 2022). Our glossary’s version of a Fluxus method is much more simple: students write small creative assignments for their peers, and each student chooses two assignments to interpret and submit. With this piece of the assignment, we highlight the tension between what can be the unhumorous gravity of concrete utopianism and the humor and lightness required by hopeful imagination: you want to do something to help save the world, but you also just want to draw a line with your head.
A similar tension suffuses work in the broad category of Afro- and indigenous futurisms, from which our project adopts its ethical orientations to the future and which constitutes a large portion of the syllabus in our respective courses. According to curator and art historian Tiffany Barber (2014, p. 20), “Afrofuturism describes how black practitioners-from Sun Ra to Wangechi Mutu … use science fiction, fantasy, and technology as a way to imagine and reimagine lost pasts and new futures for alienated ‘others’.” Artist and scholar Beth Coleman, whose recent work in AI minds includes an LLM trained on Octavia Butler’s novels, calls her own method a “wilding in the space of aesthetics,” which certainly resonates with Fluxus’s method (Coleman 2023: 7). Afro- and indigenous collective imaginaries use celebrate and “wild” to reject master narratives of cataclysm and whitewashed utopia. The end of the world, this method reminds us, has already happened (see Whyte, 2020).
Kodwo Eshun’s (2003) “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” wilds the genre of academic essay with science fiction. In it he asks readers to imagine that a team of African archaeologists from the future are sifting through an archive of 20th and 21st century art from the African diaspora. They recognize first a “futurism fatigue,” wherein practitioners are discouraged from putting energy to the future because they are too caught up with recovering and reconciling their past. Then, at the end of the 21st century, when Afrofuturism becomes retrospectively recognized as a mode, they notice that the artists see that colonial power is already working to colonize and enslave their future and that they must work against it. “It is clear,” Eshun (2003) writes, “that power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively. Capital continues to function through the dissimulation of the imperial archive, as it has done throughout the last century. Today, however, power also functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures.” Then he critiques what he calls “market dystopia”—scenarios that make the future safe for markets, but not for people. “Afrofuturism’s first priority is to recognize that Africa increasingly exists as the object of futurist projection. African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medical reports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiseration.” By inhabiting and wilding the past, present, and future, collective imagination work like our own project, informed by Afrofuturism, sees the entire planet and all of humanity’s social reality as objects of the same instrumental projections, and it actively strives to reject and supplant them.
In preparation for their own creative contributions, then, our students read and respond to work that adopts a similar ethos and methodology. They consider “Curating the End of the World” (Anderson et al. 2021) a collection available online from the Black Speculative Arts Movement which “responds to the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-black violence, climate change, poor governance, trans-humanism, and an accelerating, technologically driven economic system on the verge of collapse” with sculpture, text, and images. They read Rasheedah Phillips’s (2025) description of her “time-capsule project” that seeks to seed the future with a Black Quantum Afrofuturist past. They also read “Mundane Afro-futurist Manifesto” by Martine Syms (2013), who put it this way: “we are alternately pissed off and bored, [and] need a means of speculation and asserting a different set of values with which to re-imagine the future.” Syms offers the prefix “Mundane” to limit the tendency to escapism and to remind the artist of art’s more concrete potential for future-making. “The imaginative challenge that awaits any Mundane Afrofuturist author who accepts that this is it: Earth is all we have. What will we do with it?” she writes (Syms, 2013). And if Earth is our only space, Black philosophies also remind us that now is our only time, and that it is not best spent being “productive.” In Race, Time, and Utopia, William Paris (2024) posits utopia as an essential critical tool to escape the powers of time domination. We see the contemporary neoliberal university as a regime of time domination that “privileges efficiency and productivity” over more holistic approaches to time common to non-White forms of both time and space (Phillips, 2025). Our rejection of the idea of the glossary as a “finished product,” the rush to have something finished and deliverable, operationalizes Phillips’s (2025) critique of the “master’s time.” The decision to concentrate on process rather than product is an Afrofuturism-informed orientation to time and space.
Nicole Kuʻuleinapuananiolikoʻawapuhimelemeleolani Furtado directly links the broad umbrella of indigenous futurisms to Afrofuturisms: “It is political for Native artists to create futuristic projects of cultural expression that reimagine uses for technology that is not predicated upon continued modes of capitalist and settler-colonial extractivism” (Furtado 2024: 26-27). In our respective classes, readings in Indigenous futurisms emphasize the kind of Earth-facing emplacement that Syms (2013) calls for in her manifesto. One example of such work is the VR film Biidaaban: First Light (2018) by filmmaker Lisa Jackson and animator Matthew Borrett. The eight-minute immersive VR experience puts the viewer in familiar Toronto locations that have been mostly reclaimed by non-human life. The film is a beautiful vision of a post-capitalist future that defies the label of “dystopia.”
The glossary in action
The glossary assignment is shared across two classes—one is a visual studies course in futurisms that focuses on art, design, and aesthetics, and the other is a writing course that focuses on speculative nonfiction and futures communicated in text. Both of us have taught our courses for a few years, and one of us has taught both courses. As we’ve learned about futurisms and future imaginaries along with our students, we’ve realized that the “visual” and “written” labels on our respective classes is relatively arbitrary. Our classes’ scopes overlap more than they diverge. Moreover, the different student expertise and experience—one class with experience in art and curation, the other with experience in writing craft and editing—enrich each other. Students in both classes had the opportunity to do both written and non-written visual tasks in preparing their own entry and contributing to others.
The format for the entries and the collaboration was a Google document, so students could design their own pages. The standard course platform does not allow for such collaboration. The final entry mimicked a Wikipedia page with a navigation pane and a cross-list of entries (see Figure 1). In this section, we include examples from different keywords. Each keyword in the glossary includes (1) a table of contents, (2) an entry, (3) a call for contributions and contributions, and (4) curatorial commentary. The examples below sample each of these components from different entries to showcase the diversity of media and approaches that the assignment has inspired. Table of contents from the glossary entry on Wellbeing, with cross-references to other entries.
As we have theorized in the previous section, our focus is on process: keywording over keywords, technological/media practice over the thing/artefact, and an engagement with the present as way to offer a critique of future thinking. And so our assignment first asks students to choose a keyword that describes a practice. We asked students to draft the beginning of their entry with a simple definition and critique of the ethical/cultural commitments that the current practice entails and might entail in the future. The final list was: writing, worship, traveling, people-watching, googling, networking, stagnation, vision, trusting, live-streaming, manufacturing, cooking, driving, choosing, aging, sharing, deciding, recording, crashing-out, imperfection, fasting, remixing, gambling, consuming, wellbeing, meditation, dating, world-building, smoking, escaping, shit-posting and commitment. One theme in students’ ideas were practices that we tend to think of as “digital”: shit-posting, googling, doomscrolling. Students also seemed to want to push the exercise further and challenged the idea of a practice by choosing a more abstract concept (stagnation, imperfection, commitment, vision, wellbeing). We realized together that these keywords, though not practices perse, were ideas that shaped practice. We did not grade these choices.
Then we asked students to consider theoretical capacity; the students’ best keyword choices had great capacity to describe historical practices, non-digital practices, and potential future practices. For example, Fatima, the author of the Crashing-out entry, writes: “Imagine a future where we have dedicated crash-out days, where we break away from our daily activities, take up public gathering spaces...and yell/crash-out together. More systematically, breaks can also be implemented within the day to crash-out (i.e., mimicking the smoke break structure) to disrupt the droning 9-5 capitalist work system that has deemed the expression of emotion inefficient. She continues: “Both speculations are rooted in a desire to de-future or reject Western capitalist notions of individuality, productivity, and efficiency that deny imagination for a healthier way of living. I draw inspiration from Tricia Hersey, a Black performance artist, writer, and Afrofuturist in Chicago, who founded an organization called The Nap Ministry, which views physical rest as resistance against oppressive systems and a tool for community healing.” Fatima’s entry describes a contemporary practice amplified by digital media and imagines the practice as a theoretically informed intervention toward a better future.
Victoria, the curator of the Fasting entry did not initially imagine social media would be a part of her practice, but her thinking changed over the course of the semester and she noted this in her curatorial commentary: “When thinking about words to choose for this entry, fasting was a quick decision. While there are many meanings and practices behind the word, early drafts mainly focused on fasting for religious purposes, presenting a close-minded outlook on the word. After further exposure to peers' and professors' examples, the scope of the word fasting was widened. Lots of brainstorming and changing ideas led to the development of two prompts that strayed away from the literal not-eating-or-drinking concept of fasting.” For our focus on process, we were pleased to see the students’ own thinking evolve and change as they considered and re-considered the theoretical capacity of their keywords.
Johanna’s choice of imperfection as a keyword is a good example of theoretical capacity because it points to a set of practices that produce it, while also allowing her to critique those practices. Imagining a future that focuses on removing imperfections profits the cosmetic industry and parts of the wellness, fitness, and pharmaceutical industries. Drawing on Andrew Blauvelt’s (2020) work on defuturing, she writes: “[T]he future of physical imperfection is not empty. The present indicates a future where more technologies are used to get rid of imperfections—whether the technologies be new makeup, skincare, beauty filters, drugs, scalpels or ones that are advanced beyond our current comprehension—and where new imperfections are inherently biased towards groups that have long been oppressed.” These kinds of concepts—concepts that at first appear negative—became a theme in the glossary. Upon reflection, we find we may need more imperfection in the future.
Then comes the fun part. For the third stage of drafting glossary entries, student editors become editor-curators, and write calls for creative contributions—one for writing, and the other for non-writing—that will weird, wild, liberate, and/or illustrate their practice (see Figure 2). For this portion, we lean hard on examples from Fluxus scores and on the good faith of our wonderful students and their willingness to experiment. The creative contribution phase begins the open-ended process of editing, redesign, and revision of the glossary entries and of the glossary as a whole. The editor of the entry then becomes curator and reflects on the contribution. As students of media and visual studies, our students engaged the prompts with a variety of media: drawings (see Figures 6 and 8), photography (Figure 6), tables (see Figures 3 and 4), games, video, collage, music, mind-mapping (see Figure 5), and advertising (see Figure 7). The Crashing Out student-curator chose to present their prompts with details from the contributions. Creative contribution dietary table for the Wellbeing entry. Written contribution for the Fasting entry. Crashing Out’s mind-map prompt, with instructions and the current iteration of the mind-map.
The Crashing Out prompt and this resulting artifact are a good example of an open-ended contribution that can easily grow with future iterations of the glossary. It is also an interesting interpretation of a Fluxus-type piece that we looked at in class, “The Intermedia Chart” by Dick Higgins, which asks artists to add to a technical visualization of media use in art. We were delighted with this prompt because it employs Fluxus-type method to a digital media object and it invites commentary on a media-oriented practice (memes with humourous depictions of crashing-out).
Both the Fasting and Wellbeing prompts asked for lists/tables as critical consideration of personal daily practices. These are examples of how a structure like a list, schedule, or table can serve as a creative constraint to produce playful humor that also critiques. For Wellbeing, the student-curator, Alex, asks for a “nutritional facts” label for Wellbeing “as it means to you, personally and specifically. What is a part of Wellbeing for you? Include at least 5 components/things, with their respective percentages and dosages, that are included in what Wellbeing is made of for you.” And Victoria, the student-curator for Fasting, asks for a journal-style listing of emotional responses to a 12-h fast from social media: “Do not use any forms of social media for 12 hours. This means no Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, X, Twitch, LinkedIn, Threads, Discord, etc. At any moment you have the urge to go on social media, write down what platform you wanted to access and for what reason you wanted to check it (doom scroll, check a profile, dm someone. Any reason, any purpose, write it down.”
QQ’s tortured evening without social media (Figure 4) led Victoria to write that “these contributions uncovered that social media is so deeply integrated into our daily lives that it is impossible to imagine a future without it. [QQ’s response resonates] with themes presented in the techno-optimism manifesto by Andreessen and Wolf-Meyers’ ‘No Future’ Lexicon” (Andreessen, 2023; Wolf-Meyer, 2025). We were pleased that the theory we had been exploring earlier in the term appeared here in an unforced way.
We explicitly wanted the glossary to avoid productivity-focused practices, and we were interested to see Smoking and Gambling on the list, since certain frameworks would categorize these as not only not productive, but self-destructive. These non-productive, risky practices can be construed as “bad” behavior. What place do these practices have in the future? The contributions that these prompts elicited were both very personal and intimate—gambling is portrayed on a bed or in a kitchen with friends and family (see Figure 6). And smoking (see Figure 7) is presented in a cultural context that makes the practice a form of sacrament or blessing. In her “artist’s note,” Julia writes, “This photograph was taken in Toronto. Before I left China, a friend from Guangxi pressed a pack of Zhenlong cigarettes into my hand and said, ‘Take it with you—it will bless every Chinese child wandering the world’.” In these contributions, smoking and gambling are seen as links to sociality, diasporic identity, and cultural practices associated with the same. These aspects of humanity are things that we value for the future despite their messy counterproductivity. Two visual contributions to the Gambling entry. An advertisement submitted for the Smoking entry.
Finally, we wanted to include a drawing contribution (one of our favorites, if we are allowed to have those) from the People Watching entry. People Watching is an example of a practice that is difficult to categorize but that generated multiple strong responses from students. People Watching seems both innocuous and ubiquitous—a practice that may not need to be included in a consideration of practices for the future. But watching people do things often means watching them interact with built and technologically enabled aspects of the world that we otherwise take for granted. In Figure 8, QQ describes a scene from a train museum: “An elderly gentleman held a dilapidated train car with reverence. I didn’t have time for a deep conversation with him, but I think he must have a profound connection with trains.” Something about seeing a man hugging a train invites a critique of the telos of technological determinism while conceding that our love for technology may be part of our very humanity. A drawing contribution to the People Watching entry.
At the end of term, the students spent the last class designing, and helping each other design, their glossary entries. The projects are an aesthetically eclectic but navigable list of terms with working definitions and artistic forays into the future. Instead of a collection of graded assignments on a learning platform, we have a Google document of 40 keyword entries that we hope will continue to live in future iterations of our classes.
Future directions and questions
How are we supposed to formulate a conclusion for the description of a project that is intentionally never finished? We can reflect on our experiences, and we can articulate some non-prescriptive hopes about how the project may grow. During the year we were planning the glossary, our campus was alive with transformative energy, living inquiry, and activism. Our school’s student union challenged the administration over its silence in the face of the genocide in Palestine. The students participated in ad hoc libraries and teach-ins at the downtown encampments. Our student artists showed work at the university art gallery in shows that they curated; they edited student publications; they ran student organizations. The university continues to be a space and time away from home and before entering the labor force, but transformative moments and spaces are often found outside of the classroom. We hope that this project is a small step towards inviting that liberatory, transformative work (back) into our classrooms. As per Levitas’s utopia as an architecture or blueprint, the structure of a living, changing document within the structure of a utopia-oriented classroom is a small, concrete step in the right direction. We don’t see this project as a blueprint for an escape route from the neoliberal commons; media-informed utopian pedagogy does not function at such a grand scale. We hope that, in the coming years, this first document will serve as the base of a glossary that grows—with sub-headings, side-quests, and counter-examples. Not on some grand stage, but in the small utopia factories of our respective classes, each time a new group comes together to think about the future. As Benkler describes with the much larger but related project of Wikipedia as commons-based media production, there is a place and even a need for examples of commons-based production.
This project isn’t perfect. We would have liked more in-person, cross-class collaboration, but with students taking five sometimes six courses this just was not possible. Still, as the above examples show, the students produced creative work that we did not prescribe or suggest, and they also produced smart editorial commentary on the creative works their fellow students made. Their work is part of a living document, not siloed away in the online course management system. Is this concrete utopianism? We don't know yet, and we see the lack of a clear answer as okay. In reflecting on the process, we know that for many of the students this was just another class with just another set of assignments they had to work through, but we think that the glossary, as a project that extended across the term with unconventional tasks took both professors and students out of their comfort zones. One of us had a hard time negotiating the but-this-is-an-assignment-we-have-to-grade with the freeness that the Fluxus method asks. How to have fun with something in the context of a university classroom where ultimately it has to be graded and evaluated? How is this breaking out of the neoliberal university? Our struggles with this question don’t resolve neatly, but they are important to a utopian pedagogy. One simple answer was the fact that these glossary entries were quite fun to mark—they were messy, strange, and complicated. We couldn’t apply a standardized rubric to the diversity of media we were assessing. We also had to give credit for contributions as well as curation, and the curatorial comments focused on fellow students’ contributions. So even at the level of assessment (perhaps the most markedly neoliberal commons-inflected part of this process), the glossary was a structure for communal interdependence. And finally, there remains the question of governance, which is truly not communal or even collaborative in our prime example, Wikipedia (see Jankowski et al.), or our glossary, since as professors, we ourselves constitute a kind of sovereign authority in the classroom.
Despite these outstanding questions and tensions, we hope that we are (re)training ourselves into a utopic orientation to media and pedagogy. The classroom is a medium for shared learning and study, and we want to (re)arrange that space with a utopic pedagogy. That is, we hope to make space in the production-model idea of machinic media that record, store, and transmit the stuff between us for media practices that hold us together, allow us to commune and communicate, albeit imperfectly, through a lexicon that is not permanent, perfect, or definitive.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.