I’m in the middle of reading an article by Rikke Toft Nørgård and Kim Holflod about ‘rewilding and rewidening higher education with utopian imagination’.  Part of their argument rests on bringing hopepunk perspectives to bear on some of the grimdark realities and predicted futures of higher education. Taking a hopepunk perspective is a political choice collectively to imagine and work towards more just and hopeful futures, even if some of these initially seem preposterous. This is not naïve optimism, it’s a willingness to work for better futures with fully realistic awareness of how broken our world is currently and how bleak our futures may be. Nørgård and Holflod describe it as:

“on the one hand, a utopian insistence on believing in the possibility of wilder and wider futures and then fighting for those preferable futures to happen, and, on the other hand, rebellion against dull and domesticated futures that diminish our utopian imagination and belief in that things could be otherwise.” p. 7

So, if I were to insist on believing in a wilder and wider future for higher education what might it be like …

My wide and wild higher education would be a place where all of us in positions of power had put in the deep, difficult, slow work to understand their places in processes of oppression, their intrabeing with the natural world, and their duty to work for social and ecological justices and regeneration. It would be a higher education where all students and staff were trusted to find creative, beautiful, wild and wandering paths toward new ways of knowing and being without surveillance or metrics. Our institutions would be an integrated patchwork of places of knowing being and mattering suited to deep work toward planetary flourishing. These places would integrate online, offline, garden, forest, studio, lab, classroom and more in a rich tapestry. All sentient beings would be welcomed as they are and their contributions would be fully considered and valued in critically reflexive collaboration toward new ways forward.

What are your visions? …

Image by Iris,Helen,silvy from Pixabay