Midwifing liberatory education futures with education fiction: on the need to cultivate decolonial imagination

This paper argues that for education fiction to be a valuable methodology for studying education technology and futures, it must be rooted in the context of our current era, marked by polycrisis, collapse, and the enduring influence of colonial modernity. We begin with a reflexive analysis of academic knowledge production and then explore how education fiction can inadvertently reproduce colonial logics of these contexts are ignored. Drawing on the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective’s concept of ‘hospicing modernity,’ we propose cultivating a decolonial imagination, one that holds grief, complicity, and possibility, as a strategy for midwifing liberatory education futures. We further argue that education fiction can function as a prefigurative method: a space to practice relational, decolonial ways of knowing and worldmaking. This approach is especially urgent in relation to education technologies, which remain deeply entangled with extractive systems.