Cultivating the Possible: Reimagining Education and Society / 3rd International Conference of Possibility Studies, All Hallows Campus, Dublin City University, Dublin, July 17–21, 2023

Since its inaugural conference in May 2021, the Possibility Studies Network (PSN) has emerged as a vibrant space of hope, inspiring scholars, and practitioners around the globe to revive, (re)discover, and (re)imagine a central dimension of human existence: the possible. Following the success of the first two conferences online, in 2023 the network organized its first fully in-person event on the theme of Cultivating the Possible: Reimagining Education and Society. Hosted by the School of Psychology at Dublin City University, in partnership with Creative Ireland, the latest conference brought together more than 150 participants from over twenty-five countries with the aim of "advancing the theoretical and practical understanding of how individuals and collectives become aware of and explore possibilities in the realm of the psychological, material, technological, social, cultural and political."1In his inaugural keynote speech, Vlad Glăveanu (Dublin City University), the founder and president of PSN, outlined five key questions for the emergent, transdisciplinary field of possibility studies: (1) what kinds of psychological, social, material, technological and cultural resources and processes enable our engagement with the possible?; (2) how do individual differences, environmental contexts, and situational factors "collaborate" in shaping experiences of the possible?; (3) what is the relation between individual, group, community, and societal forms of becoming aware of and exploring possibilities?; (4) how do power relations structure our imagination of the possible, and with what consequences for how self and society are constituted?; and (5) what is our guide for deciding which possibilities to enact and which to reject, which possibilities are valuable, and which are harmful?These questions guided the conference experience, while still leaving space for other challenging questions to emerge. The five days of engaging discussions were due to not only the diversity in themes but also the variety of formats for presentations, workshops, and debates. The first three days of the conference were organized around keynote speeches by global scholars, who represented a wide range of disciplines from cognitive psychology to creative writing. The keynotes were followed by paper presentations and symposia—as well as "Principles of Circus" workshops by the National Circus School of Montréal,2—and presentations from Creative Ireland. Finally, the last two days of the conference featured a debate between Michael Hanchett Hanson (Columbia University) and Giovanni Corazza (University of Bologna) on the status of "the real" in possibility studies, interactive workshops,3 the presentation of possibility hubs, and ample networking opportunities.The ethos of the conference was explicitly multidisciplinary, featuring contributions from many possibility-related fields, including creativity, imagination, serendipity, utopias/dystopias, psychology, futures studies, education, philosophy, ethics, literary and narrative studies, queer and (trans)gender studies, health and well-being research, environmental studies, and the arts, among other disciplines. While some of these fields count on their own rich and long-standing traditions of reflections on the possible, the conference provided a unique space where diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives could engage, nurture, and challenge each other in open, dialogic, and transdisciplinary encounters.As highlighted by the conference co-organizer Wendy Ross (London Metropolitan University) in her keynote lecture "Cultivating the Possible," such genuine interdisciplinary encounters represent an opportunity to push ourselves beyond the limits of our disciplines, to develop more comprehensive theoretical frameworks and methodologies, and to formulate new questions, advancing the study of possibility in exciting new directions. Given the complex, multifaceted and dynamic nature of the possible, this inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary ethos lies at the very heart of PSN's annual conferences. Moreover, the polyphonic nature of the event was anchored by a set of common themes and questions that held diverse voices and disciplinary perspectives in both collaborative harmony and reciprocal tension.Many papers explored the connections between possibility studies, education, and pedagogy in a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA).4 Most contributions emphasized the urgency of reimagining traditional educational systems and the development of "pedagogies of the possible" that can respond to the challenges of today's rapidly evolving, unpredictable, and complex world.5 As argued by Margaret Mangion (University of Malta), Andreia Valquaresma (University of Maia; University of Porto), and Maciej Karwowski (University of Wrocław) "Ready or Not The Possible is Here!," designing learning experiences that intentionally explore and embrace the possible is crucial to building a future capable of responding to the Anthropocene. In elaborating on such pedagogies of the possible, participants outlined pedagogical approaches infused with relationality, uncertainty, difference, creativity, wonder, imagination, promise, hope, transformation, liminality, and embodied learning.A relevant example arose during Kenneth J. Gergen's (Swarthmore College) keynote titled "The Relational Route to Unleashing the Potentials of Education." Gergen advocated for a paradigm shift from the existing educational system, which is largely based on an industrial, factory model, to a relational orientation to education. In his view, relational processes constitute the primary source of knowledge, learning, meaning, reason, and value. While traditional education tends to disregard the relational dimension of our being and learning, we can unleash the immensely rich potential for inclusive, engaged, ethical, future-promising, and possibility-expanding education by nurturing it. This relational potential is made vivid, for example, in co-design, participatory pedagogies, transformative learning, and Community Engaged Learning projects as discussed at the conference. Embracing relationality—in all its complexity and diversity—has thus emerged as one of the key challenges for contemporary education.Apart from relationality, many conference contributors stressed the importance of embracing learning as a holistic, integrated, affect-infused, and embodied process. As argued by Lucy Allen and her colleagues from the University of Technology Sydney, contemporary challenges cannot be addressed through the lens of the mind alone, and more efforts should be made to develop pedagogies attentive to body-mind-environment interactions. On the other hand, Ronald A. Beghetto (Arizona State University) foregrounded the importance of embracing uncertainty as a central dimension of life, learning, and of our global futures. In his keynote address, he explored how AI and design can foster young people's possibility thinking and their capacity to approach current and future uncertainties "with an unshakeable sense of the possible." Underscoring the generative and possibility-disclosing potential of difference, the Young Scholar Keynote Luciana Dantas de Paula (University of Brasília) emphasized the need to foster teachers' abilities to engage with differences in the context of conflicts, tensions, prejudices, and discrimination. Teachers can cultivate the possible inside and outside the classroom by developing these skills.To face global challenges, however, it is not enough for individuals to be capable of navigating differences, uncertainties, and complexities; it is also necessary to foster creative individuals, organizations, and societies who can envision new solutions. Nevertheless, within the current context of rising authoritarianism and the post-truth era, more attention should be paid to how creativity is deployed in our individual, social, and political lives. In his moving keynote address, "Transformational Creativity," psychologist Robert J. Sternberg (Cornell University) urged us to embrace and cultivate transformational creativity that aspires to make positive, meaningful, and lasting contributions to the world and lives of others. Unlike transactional creativity, which is driven by rewards, personal privileges, and power, transformational creativity is grounded in wisdom and ethics. It thus seeks the common good and collective well-being. In a world with many charismatic, pseudo-transformational leaders and autocrats, creativity can quickly become a tool for manipulation, reinforcement of dictatorial regimes, and the merciless destruction of others. As Sternberg insisted, such a world desperately needs educational systems oriented toward transformational creativity. For Shannon Steen (University of California, Berkeley), the Western concept of creativity and creative education needs to be rethought in light of its close association and complicity with neoliberalism. Operating as a key neoliberal mechanism, creativity today is frequently identified with individualism, self-expression, self-fulfillment, and the idealization of the individual at the expense of the social. To break with this neoliberal logic, we must redefine creativity as a social and relational practice.As conveyed by many of the papers, educational settings serve as an essential site of wonder, imagination, promise, hope, and transformative experiences. It is a site where we can expand our sense of the possible by challenging the status quo and envisioning alternative, more hopeful, and sustainable futures for us and our planet. As pointed out by Bem Le Hunte (University of Technology Sydney), learning experiences can illuminate the possibilities of reality in deeply transformative and enlightening ways. In that sense, pedagogies of the possible share with utopian pedagogies the desire to create educational spaces for transformative hope, and for opening up transgressive and transformative possibilities within the present, thus pointing beyond the world-as-it-is toward the world-as-it-could-be. By cultivating these pedagogies in our classrooms and communities, we can prepare future generations to confront contemporary challenges, and to envision new possibilities for our world in a reflective, critical, creative, proactive, loving, and ethical manner.Another theme that linked many conference contributions is the power of literature and narratives to shape and transform our sense of the possible. Ranging from Kim Wilkins's (University of Queensland) keynote on character-building in creative writing as a template for playing with and enacting possibilities in literature and beyond, to Trudy Meehan's (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland) presentation on the therapeutic functions of literature, and to Rebecca Braun's (University of Galway) keynote defense of literary techniques as tools that can drive new ways of envisioning the future, all speakers connected the field of possibilities to language, stories, and meaning-making.Ubiquitous was the sense that the focus on a study of possibilities comes at a crucial moment in human history, a moment of profound transformations and transitions. Many researchers stressed the importance of possibility studies as a field of study in the context of rapid technological developments that are revolutionizing our sense of the possible across all aspects of our lives, from education to art, from medicine to justice. Constance de Saint Laurent (Dublin City University), for example, addressed some of these worries in her keynote "Generative AI and the Possible: A New Dawn or a New Dusk for Human Creativity?" Arguing that most of the questions we are asking about AI stem from unfounded fears, the keynote stressed how we must direct our attention toward how AI is programmed and how we can start to ground our technological concerns in empirical reality rather than in misconceptions. Of equal importance is to address AI's potential to silence historically marginalized voices, homogenize human experience, and limit our creativity. These reflections are not limited to the field of possibility studies but extend to many other fields of knowledge, including utopian studies. Both fields share concerns about how rapid technological developments can affect human creativity, our sense of the possible, and our capacity to envision possible futures. To that end, scholars of the possible and scholars of utopia would greatly benefit from engaging in a closer dialogue and collaboration. There is a great opportunity for growth in the intersection of the two fields.Many other scholars have addressed the relevance of possibility studies in the context of growing social inequalities. As illustrated by many presentations, the conditions of poverty, social discrimination, political repression, trauma, and severe illness can undermine our sense of agency, hope, and possibility. Within such conditions, it becomes of utmost importance to expand our sense of the possible, and to create meaningful social alternatives. Echoing Glăveanu's manifesto, several papers further explored the need to develop an ethics of the possible, grounded in "a sustained reflection on the scope, nature, and limits of our engagement with the possible and the consequences this engagement has for ourselves, for others, for society, and for the planet."6 Fiachra Ó Brolcháin (Dublin City University), Pamela Burnard (University of Cambridge), and Heather Alberro (Nottingham Trent University), for example, underlined the importance of expanding our values to include nonhuman and more-than-human agents and their multiple entanglements. By attending to nature, materiality, broader ecosystems, and human and nonhuman entanglements, possibilities studies hold significant potential in broadening our collective ethical horizon of what is valuable, what should be cared for, and what forms of relationality can enable the survival of our planet. In her keynote address "Creating Lives: The Possibilities of Human Freedom," psychologist Barbara Kerr (University of Kansas) stressed the necessity and the joy of preserving and cherishing simple, ordinary, yet profoundly transformative acts of life. By embracing such primal needs as playing, telling stories, making love, or creating things, we can support and expand one another's freedom. All conference participants shared Wendy Ross's observation that in a time of a profound crisis, the purpose of possibility studies is "to expand the possible and restore hope."7 From this perspective, like utopian studies, possibility studies engage in the critical and holistic task of envisioning alternatives to our current ecological, social, and political crises. By opening a meaningful, transdisciplinary conversation about the centrality of the possible in our existence and our world, the third PSN conference Cultivating the Possible: Reimagining Education and Society served as a hopeful, critical site for interrogating and reflecting on what possibilities and futures we need, want, can and should create for us, future generations, and our shared planet.It is undeniable that further inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue and practical collaborations between possibility studies and utopian studies constitute a vibrant and promising line of research and action. Both fields center the possible, imagination, social justice, pedagogy, and hope; as such, possibility studies and utopian studies can nurture, challenge, and illuminate each other in new, profound and mutually enriching ways. In addition to the dialogue between disciplines, we also wish to underscore the importance of bringing into the possibility community those voices, perspectives and worldviews that are traditionally excluded from academic narratives and dominant discourses. Future events and conferences will undoubtedly serve as an indispensable site for expanding the multiplicity of voices and opening up new collaborations that will continue to build the future of this complex and fascinating new field.