Science-fiction can be a tool in Higher Education. It can be used not only to engage students and trigger reflection based on existing art works, but also as an invitation to write and think about their own biography. In my Bachelor course on Environmental Psychology, I have been using science-fiction in the last 8 years, co-teaching with Laurent Kloetzer: writing science-fiction is performed through creative tasks or protokools inspired by a collective of French science-fiction writers, le collectif Zanzibar. My experience is that science-fiction writing is a powerful way to trigger personal narratives on environmental issues and share them in the students’ group to discuss the past, the present and the future of our co-habitation with more-than-humans. How, then, do young people imagine the future?

The results have been published in a scientific paper:

Kloetzer, L., & Kloetzer, L. (2025). Instant Futures: an experimental study of the imagination of alternative near futures thanks to science fiction. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 59(1), 25.

Following Vygotsky’s seminal work, sociocultural psychology has developed a powerful theory of imagination, considered as a process with transformative impacts in the social world. However, the sociocultural imagination of the future lacks specificity, despite its importance as an arena of social and political contestation. With Laurent Kloetzer, we argued for integrating experimental methods into the scientific study of the re-composition, or synthesis process, in the imagination of the future. Provoking the imagination of the future in well-structured conditions allows for intra and interpersonal compari- sons, as well as for comparisons through time. We analyse the data collected through this telescope into the imagination of the future looking at a specific process of imagining the future comparing dystopian and utopian futures. This research includes the findings from the analysis of a corpus of 186 narratives collected over 4-years with my Bachelor students in Psychology and Education in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. The analysis shows that the process of imagining the future is asymetrical for dystopian and utopian futures.