Imagining Otherwise: Academic Communication as Utopian Practice

• In Event: Futuring through Form: Multimodal Scholarship and Public Engagement

Abstract

This paper examines how academic communication practices shape our collective capacity to imagine alternative digital futures. Reconceptualizing academic communication itself as utopian practice, this final paper asks: How do scholarly communication practices either enable or foreclose possibilities for imagining hopeful digital futures? And how might we reimagine academic communication to better nurture these possibilities?

Drawing on the author’s research into youth political expression on social media and their experience navigating public discussions about platforms like TikTok, this paper examines the troubling disconnect between nuanced scholarly insights and dominant public narratives of technological doom. While educational research on youth digital practices reveals complex patterns of civic engagement and creative resistance, these hopeful, nuanced insights often fail to travel beyond academic contexts, leaving public discourse dominated by moral panics and technological determinism. The paper argues that this isn't just a communication problem—it's a social imagination problem (Greene, 1995). The way we communicate about digital culture actively shapes what kinds of futures feel possible, making our scholarly communication practices inseparable from the critical project of “futuring for education and educational research” that the AERA 2026 presidential program theme speaks to.
To illustrate this argument in a playful way and “make the phenomenon strange” (Carey, 1989), this paper employs critical discourse analysis of academic and popular media texts through a playful, defamiliarizing frame: a satirical account of alien researchers' increasingly frustrated attempts to understand Earth youth's digital media practices. Through a series of field notes where aliens log confusing encounters with academic research—contrasted with their discovery of oversimplified trade books about “kids these days” (in the vein of Haidt, 2024)—the paper demonstrates how current knowledge systems impede nuanced, hopeful perspectives. In the end, the aliens conclude that reductive popular accounts must represent Earth's actual knowledge system, and proceed to file their own oversimplified report about impending digital doom.
Using this satirical frame to make visible—and thus changeable—the structures that constrain our collective imagination, the paper reveals how academic conventions function as invisible barriers that systematically exclude hopeful narratives from public discourse. It argues that reimagining academic communication is not just about accessibility, but is central to media studies' ability to help cultivate utopian possibilities. The paper thus contributes to the session's vision of multimodal scholarship as both critique and intervention, showing how the very structures through which we communicate research actively shape what kinds of educational futures feel possible to imagine and construct.

Author

• Ioana Literat, Teachers College, Columbia University