Future-memory fractals: toward a decolonial understanding of temporality and childhood

Application summary

This PhD study investigates the notion of 'future' from theoretical and experiential domains, refusing the assumption that it is a self-evident conception. Even though childhood is entwined with futurity, we only scantly see educational sciences and childhood studies turning their attention to the conception of future itself. My research contributes to such theorizations, linking concepts of futures with childhoods. The study brings together Black feminism and new-materialist theorizations, contributing to the fields of philosophy of education and childhood studies with new insights on concepts and practices related to describing, conceiving, planning, and implementing ‘future-oriented’ changes for children. Three distinct aspects of futures were studied: a) philosophical, looking into how futures integrate constructions of temporality in modern and postmodern philosophies; b) experiential, exploring memories of moments when the artists-participants sensed that futures were unfolding for them in postcolonial countries; c) aesthetic, understanding futures as compositions imbued with residual pasts, improvised in between the affects permeating daily life. The purpose of this research is threefold: creating a needed stance from which to unsettle progress-driven notion about ‘the future’; devising the pressing understanding that ‘future’ is a conception entangled with colonialist political-symbolic infrastructures; and creating actions promoting decolonial imaginaries of futures in educational practices. The monograph will include a fortune-telling deck of cards, created from the analysis of the participants' written memory stories. The fortune-telling system entwines theoretical and artistic dimensions of the study, and it does not aim to predict the future. Instead, it offers an occasion for the readers to engage with futures as improvised practices of remembering and living together with non-humans and humans in an ecologically fragile world.