Worldbuilding as a Way to Imagine Futures: Using Futures Thinking within Qualitative Interviewing

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting Power in Qualitative Research: Three Alternative Approaches to Data Collection and Analysis

Abstract

We want to create the worlds we want, not just the worlds we are fighting against, where alternatives are imagined for the current social or political conditions. Imagination then becomes a process for disrupting dominant narratives and can become sites of change where Western cultural thought, as Walter Mignolo (2007) and Aníbal Quijano (2000) describes the “Colonial Matrix of Power”, is then deemed insufficient for understanding place and people (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Smith, 2021; Escobar, 2018). With imagination, it is still important to ask who does the imagining, who is allowed to imagine, and for whom is the imagination for. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021) asks similar questions on imagination regarding history, research, and academic writing and the representation of Indigenous voices, stories, and experiences.
Worldbuilding within an interview protocol involves going beyond standard interview questions in both creating a space for dreaming and imagining and in structuring questions using scenario building best practices (Zaidi, 2017). Futures methods and tools are used for helping individuals interrogate, think about, and understand possible and alternative futures. They are useful in centering conversations oriented towards temporality thinking and are often universal in their construct. These tools also often take time and are usually implemented in single to multi-day workshop settings. Using adaptation of futures tools and frameworks within the semi-structured interviews for this study is not meant to teach or provide a workshop experience for participants. Rather, this integration allows insertion of needed scaffolding for probing futures thinking within the interview process beyond question-and-answer prompts. This is essential because futures can be a difficult or abstract concept to explain to or discuss with others.
This paper describes a portion of an interview process meant to facilitate a conversation about how evaluators currently understand, interrogate, and envision futures. To do this well, futures tools are used such as a Mad-Libs version of an adapted form of Scenario World Building (Lewitt, 2014; Zaidi, 2017; Zaidi, 2019; De Jouvenel, 2000; Vervoort et al., 2015) and an adapted Backcasting or Panarchy (Zaidi, 2017) from the previously created futures world scenario. Integration of these tools allows for discussion around past(s), present(s), and future(s). The interview conversation is anchored around evaluator epistemology, ontology, and practice – what exists – while using futures tools intentionally to create space in the interview itself for imagining a future world 25 or 50 years in the future. Interviewees are also able to dictate and drive the imagination in the interview process as they build and engage in their own imaginations, rather than the researcher’s imagination.

Author

• Ramya Kumaran, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign