UFS Futuring Summer School: Futuring for Democracy

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This year, our Futuring summer school will zoom in on the increasing vulnerability of democratic political systems. Between the escalating consequences of climate change and ecological collapse, changing geopolitical configurations, a tech-oligarchy, and increasing anti-democratic pressures, political prospects are deeply uncertain. More than at any time since the close of WWII, fundamental ideas such as freedom and democracy are being reimagined. What can we learn from the experiences and strategies of far-right and conservative movements? We address these questions using  futuring, a novel approach to future-making pioneered by the UFS, and dramaturgy.

We find ourselves amidst a wave of populism, nativism, and environmental backsliding. The resistance to change is palpable. So deeply entrenched are our unsustainable aspirations that any attempt to question them is widely received as a threat to people’s freedom. The power of these aspirations raises an important question: are there perhaps lessons to learn from the far-right and conservatives about how to speak to people's yearnings and how to capture the future? Can we learn lessons, for example, about how to cultivate a sense of belonging? Or must a genuinely just movement develop and share images of the future in an entirely different manner?

Our starting point is to treat politics as fundamentally an act of collective faith: in the kinds of future that are perceived as possible and desirable. Futuring and dramaturgy can be understood as the techniques through which this collective faith is constructed, maintained, challenged, and transformed. Drawing on a range of breakthrough work developed within and beyond the Urban Futures Studio, we will take researchers and practitioners on a journey to understanding how the future gets captured and how we might begin to reclaim it. Texts include Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics (Hajer & Oomen, 2025), which claims that our aspirations for the future have been captured by those with a vested interest in the status quo; and Dramaturgies of Change: Staging Political Transformation (Stacey, Oomen, Hoffman & Hajer 2025), which emphasises that there are certain symbols that shapes the futures people consider possible and desirable and identifies the dramaturgical means of convincingly reinterpreting these symbols.

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