Designing Democracy Under Conditions of Uncertainty: Imagined Futures in Educational Simulations

Contemporary global turbulence - marked by democratic backsliding, climate and geopolitical crises, and rapid technological transformations - challenges dominant models of citizenship rooted in stability, territoriality, and institutional trust (IPCC, 2023; SIPRI, 2025). These conditions not only reshape the political opportunities available to citizens but also influence how citizenship itself is understood, practiced, and experienced. This paper explores how alternative forms of citizenship can be imagined, rehearsed, and critically examined through innovative educational practices. Drawing on the concept of imagined futures (Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2015) and an empirical case study of the educational simulation Democracy on Mars, the paper analyses how speculative, future-oriented learning environments enable young people to experiment with new civic roles, values, and collective modes democracy. The Democracy on Mars workshops deliberately displace participants from familiar political frameworks, inviting them to design governance systems for a hypothetical off-Earth society under conditions of ecological limits, radical uncertainty, and social interdependence. This speculative setting creates a productive distance from existing institutions, allowing participants to articulate alternative conceptions of civic responsibility, collective agency and democratic belonging based on care, shared responsibility, ecological embeddedness, and relational autonomy. Our qualitative findings from workshops demonstrate that the imagined futures of democracy and citizenship generated in the educational context are not escapist scenarios, but rather are deeply embedded in participants’ current experiences, practices and interpretations of civic and political participation, and shaped by ongoing processes of polarisation, social distrust, political contestation and radicalisation. In this sense, imagined futures function as a critical tool for examining how citizenship and democracy are currently understood, valued, or contested by young people living through turbulent times. To situate these workshop findings in a broader context, the presentation integrate data from the DEMOCRAT project, including both the qualitative insight and quantitative analysis of youth civic and political participation. This mix-methods approach highlights how citizenship is shaped through everyday practices – in families, at school, in peer groups – and wider political and social context. These factors influence young people’s democratic engagement as well as their perception of agency, responsibility, and belonging. By linking young people’s lived experiences with speculative visions of alternative democratic models, the presentation argues that educational practices engaging imagined futures play a crucial role in cultivating responsible citizenship skills and preparing young people to navigate and reshape democratic life under conditions of ongoing crisis. Therefore, the presentation contributes to the debates on citizenship and subjecthood by showing how educational practices that engage imagined futures expand the repertoire of civic imaginaries, fostering capacities for collective responsibility, critical thinking and democratic resilience in context of crisis and uncertainty. Cuzzocrea, V., & Mandich, L. (2015). Students’ narratives of the future: Imagined mobilities as forms of youth agency? Journal of Youth Studies, 19(4). Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (2025). SIPRI Yearbook 2025: Armaments, disarmament and international security. SIPRI.