Reimagining Youth Agency, Imagination, and Protopian Futures | Protopian Futures Curriculum
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Young people are coming of age amid overlapping global crises — climate instability, technological acceleration, democratic erosion, and widespread social fragmentation. While youth today are deeply informed and highly engaged in changemaking, the dominant cultural narrative surrounding the future is one of inevitability and collapse. Constant exposure to catastrophe has made it increasingly difficult to imagine futures that feel livable, actionable, or worth building.
At the same time, emerging technologies, especially AI, are rapidly shaping how futures are imagined, governed, and made visible. These systems are often treated as predictive or authoritative, despite being trained on past data that reflects existing inequities, exclusions, and dystopian assumptions. The result is a widening gap between young people’s desire to shape the future and their perceived capacity to do so.
This work responds to a central question: How do we help young people reclaim imagination, hope, and agency - not as abstract ideals, but as practiced, collective skills - within the technological landscapes they already inhabit?
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In deep collaboration with Anatola Araba, Reimagine Story Lab.
I designed and am leading the development of the Protopian Futures Curriculum, an imagination- and futures-literacy program that integrates storytelling, embodied play, ethical AI engagement, and intergenerational repair frameworks.
My role includes:
Designing the overall curriculum architecture and theory of change
Developing facilitation frameworks grounded in futures thinking, narrative strategy, and wellbeing science
Integrating ethical AI as a visualization and agency-building tool (not a predictive one)
Creating participatory activities that translate abstract futures thinking into lived, relational practice
Building the facilitator’s guide, modular workshop flows, and youth-facing learning experiences
Shaping the curriculum as a regenerative, long-term offering for youth leaders, educators, and partner organizations
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Modular futures-literacy curriculum (What Is → What If → What Could Be)
Facilitator’s guide and training materials
Youth-facing workbooks and activity cards
AI-assisted imagination and worldbuilding exercises
Ethical AI literacy and governance activities for youth
Visual worldbuilding and futures rehearsal tools
Evaluation and reflection frameworks for measuring imagination, agency, and resilience
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Miro, Google Suite, ChatGPT
Futures & foresight methodologies (protopian futures, scenario rehearsal)
Narrative strategy and storytelling frameworks
Participatory and embodied facilitation practices
Ethical AI prompting and visualization tools
Systems thinking and intergenerational repair frameworks
Analog and digital worldbuilding methods
Quick Project Overview
Title: Protopian Futures Curriculum: Reimagining Youth Agency, Imagination, and Ethical AI
Partnership and Collaboration: Anatola Araba, Reimagine Story Lab
Status: January 2026, Ongoing
The Protopian Futures Curriculum is a youth-centered learning experience designed to strengthen imagination, hope, and resilience as skills—not personality traits. Rather than asking young people to predict or fix the future, the curriculum invites them to rehearse futures that are still marginal but deeply possible.
The program integrates playful, embodied imagination practices with ethical AI literacy, positioning technology as a landscape for agency rather than an authority over outcomes. AI is used to help participants visualize possibility, translate intangible ideas into sensory form, and critically examine how values and data shape what futures feel visible.
Across workshops and multi-session programs, participants move from naming inherited narratives of inevitability to practicing protopian futures grounded in care, repair, governance, and everyday behavior.
Impact
This work is designed to support:
Youth leaders in reclaiming imagination as a regenerative resource
Increased futures literacy and confidence living inside uncertainty
A shift from reactive, crisis-driven changemaking toward protopian, practice-based leadership
Greater agency in how young people engage with and shape emerging technologies
Intergenerational continuity by investing in young people as long-term stewards of social change
Rather than producing a single intervention, this curriculum functions as infrastructure—building the imaginative capacity that sustains changemaking over time.
Why This Work Matters
This project reflects my broader practice of helping individuals and organizations move from collapse-oriented thinking toward futures grounded in care, agency, and continuity.
Instead of asking young people to remain resilient inside broken systems — or to imagine perfect alternatives detached from reality —this work creates space to practice the in-between: the slow, relational work of building futures that are slightly better, more just, and more livable than the present.
It asks a different set of questions:
What if imagination is not an escape, but a form of care?
What if hope is not a feeling, but a practiced skill?
What if young people already have what they need to shape the future—if given the right conditions?
