RF Futures Forum

18th June 2026

Watch the recording here

Anthropocene challenges demand educational spaces where learners can interpret crises, communicate uncertainty, and imagine collective futures. Yet such work is often confined to science, sustainability, or environmental studies classrooms. This presentation focused on undergraduate Communication Skills classrooms for engineering students as generative sites for Anthropocene education. Drawing on classroom experiments designed to strengthen listening, speaking, reading, and writing capabilities, it showed how visual provocations, discussions, reflective writing, and oral tasks can create moments for education for collective futures. The presentation argued that language pedagogy can become a powerful transdisciplinary space for future-facing education.

Vishal Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Manipal University Jaipur. His research lies at the intersection of science education, scientific literacy, socioscientific issues, environmental education, and communication pedagogy. His work examines how teachers, classrooms, and curricula can respond to socio-ecological crises in Indian school and higher education contexts. His current pedagogical research explores how Communication Skills classrooms for engineering students can create opportunities for Anthropocene education, climate dialogue, and future-oriented learning.

25th May 2026

Watch the recording here

Dubbed the “STEAM Dream team” in a local primary school, Emma and Jo have planned collaboratively in the Arts and STEAM curriculum areas, designing challenging units of learning for grades Prep – 6. For the last three years, Emma has taught Visual and Media Arts and STEAM, and Jo has taught the Performing Arts (Dance, Drama and Music) and STEAM. In this Futures Forum, they talked about the design and implementation of a whole school unit of learning based on micro bats and educating our community; followed by a Q & A on Emma’s recent collaboration with another local school and Bats of Geelong Rescue organisation on Flying Foxes, culminating in an amazing display at a local community environmental festival. They demonstrate the importance of creative collaboration by educators for optimal experiential learning for students and connection to the wider community.

Emma Martinson is a multi-disciplinary educator leading the Arts and STEAM programs at a local Bellarine school. Her pedagogy is informed by a background in natural history illustration and a former career as a graphic designer, which she leverages to create projects fostering environmental stewardship and ecological connection. Recently, Emma’s training in flying fox rescue has sparked a passion for the species, leading her to develop a community science initiative with Zoos Victoria to advocate for these misunderstood mammals. This work builds upon her previous involvement with the Deakin Marine department, where she was involved in the Great Southern Reef research project and has since continued to share and design Art-STEAM resources.

Jo-Anne Britt’s research interests include the Arts curriculum and arts-based pedagogy, inclusive education and STEAM education, particularly around environmental issues and Sustainability. Future research centres around posthumanism foci of symbiosis and reciprocity with human, non-human and more than human kinds. Jo has 40+ years’ experience designing learning experiences and teaching in primary schools. Jo has also worked as a casual academic in the arts education field for more than six years. Currently Jo is awaiting the results of her PhD submission inquiring into how arts-based pedagogy can promote inclusive education.display at a local community environmental festival. They demonstrate the importance of creative collaboration by educators for optimal experiential learning for students and connection to the wider community.

7th May 2026

Watch the recording here

Over the past few years, terroir has become a central concept in Martin’s research and practice. This talk retraces key moments in that terroirisation and reflects on how it has reshaped my approaches to research, public engagement and teaching. Drawing on my forthcoming co‑authored book Science Communication as Sustainability, Martin introduces terroir as an expansive mode of science communication attentive to place, multiple temporalities and more‑than‑human relations. He then explores two examples that move from theory to practice: public engagement with green toads and place-based teaching in polluted urban naturecultures. Through these examples, I explore what happens when we insist on terroirising everything and invite you to try it out.

Martin Grünfeld is an independent scholar and external lecturer in European Ethnology at the University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in continental philosophy from University College Dublinbut often finds himself working in the intersections between disciplines and engaging in transdisciplinary collaborations with artists, communicators and curators involving other organisms. For the past five years, he has worked as a curator and researcher at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen, focusing on care, decay, metabolism and more-than-human art-science collaborations. Currently, he is developing his research in arts-based science communication focusing on issues such as biodiversity loss and sustainability through sound art.

21st April 2026

Watch the recording here

What might it mean to listen with our bodies in times of socio-ecological change? In this talk, you are invited to eat, taste, ingest, and sense an unfolding research inquiry. The objective is to foreground a methodological premise: that we are always already inside the systems we seek to understand and transform; that, as you eat, you participate in metabolic, ecological, and regulatory relations that connect bodies, environments, and futures; and that tasting, sensing, and ingesting can become modes of inquiry through which those relations can be engaged with and understood otherwise. Building on food-based co-creation practices developed in Sápmi – unceded Sámi territories spanning the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia – the talk explores how collective acts of harvesting, preparing, and sharing food can function as infrastructures for deep listening and attunement.

Rather than representing ecological dynamics, the food aims to reflect the complex, lived experiences of multispecies ecologies, in which fishers, hunters, seals, microbes, mud, waters, and policies are entangled in practice. Food becomes a medium through which lived experience can be translated, without reduction, into forms that can be collectively sensed and negotiated. In doing so, it creates conditions for addressing persistent disconnects between societal structures and lived realities, and for making perceptible how value is organised within society – what is recognised, cared for, and acted upon. As the talk progresses, I ask what it means to carry such methods across contexts. What must shift when working on Country in Australia, where food, knowledge, and responsibility are held within enduring cultural practices that differ from those in Sápmi? Rather than transfer, this requires careful translation – grounded in listening, accountability, and respect for Indigenous sovereignties and knowledge systems. By eating together, participants are invited to consider these questions, and how we might learn to listen, eat, and act within futures we do not fully control, but will collectively inhabit.

Danielle Wilde is Full Professor at Umeå University, Sweden, and the University of Southern Denmark, and Arctic Six Chair of Environmental (Arctic) Food Citizenship. Her research mobilises food practices and Traditional Knowledges as sites for deep listening, envisioning, and co-creating futures for self-determination amid socio-ecological transition. Working through participatory Research through Design with food, Wilde collaborates with communities and decision-makers to address disconnects between societal structures and lived experience—reimagining eco-social citizenship, education, and policy through situated, more-than-human relations, and centring culture and embodiment as living practices shaping coherent transitions and resilient futures.

10th April 2026

Watch the recording here

Oscar’s research positions filmmaking as a mode of philosophical inquiry. The short documentary film A Short Film About Anything explores what gives people meaning in everyday life. Through narrative structure, interviews and imagery are organised to reveal shared experience as a key contributor to meaningfulness. Adopting a slow cinema aesthetic also enabled a praxis through which a theoretical relationship between duration, change and meaning emerged. Together, these insights demonstrate how filmmaking can function as practice-based philosophy, generating forms of understanding that differ from traditional research models.

Oscar Axel Thorborg is a Swedish-born, Australian-based filmmaker. Over the past 15 years, he has worked as a writer, director, editor and cinematographer across commercial projects, television, web series and short films. Alongside his creative practice, he has developed an academic interest in philosophy, holding a Bachelor’s and Honours degree and currently completing a PhD. His work has screened and received awards at festivals including Rhode Island International, Heartland, St Kilda and Byron Bay, as well as earning multiple awards from the Australian Cinematographers’ Society, where he serves as acting secretary.

24th March 2026

Watch the recording here

Franziska’s doctoral project investigates how soil health can be meaningfully integrated into science education within the framework of One Health Education. Conceptualising soil health as a socio-scientific issue, the study explores how pre-service teachers and in-service teachers engage with complex scientific, societal, and environmental dimensions through socio-scientific modelling. Using a design-based research approach, the project combines exploratory qualitative studies with iterative development and testing of instructional materials in teacher education contexts. The overarching aim is to support the development of content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge while fostering systems thinking and the ability to connect soil health topics to learners’ everyday lives.

Franziska Massenboeck holds a degree in Environmental Education from the University College for Agricultural and Environmental Education in Vienna, Austria. In recent years, she has worked as a project coordinator for the Teaching Clinic, an action research initiative with in-service teachers, and the One Health Teaching Clinic, which collaborates with subject matter experts to bring pressing One Health topics into schools. She co-organised the Vienna Mushroom Festival, attracting over 5,000 visitors and sparking her research interest in soil health and its interconnections with human and environmental wellbeing. To broaden her perspectives on science education, she came to Melbourne to engage with different educational cultures and research traditions for teaching complex socio-scientific issues.

18th March 2026

Watch the recording here

This presentation outlines Kate’s 2025 ASP research project, which investigates attention as a dramaturgical practice. Through field recording, graphic scoring, and dialogic inquiry with scholars and theatre-makers across diverse landscapes – from the desert country of the Western Wimmera to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado – the project examines how acts of attending generate new knowledge about place, embodiment, and theatrical presence. Kate presents her fieldwork findings to propose an expanded dramaturgical framework that emphasises felt experience as a profound way of making meaning.

Kate Hunter is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, improvisation, painting, and sound. Originally trained in theatre, she creates miniature immersive installations and site-specific works that explore listening as both a dramaturgical device and research method. Her practice employs painted surfaces, hydrophone recordings, and audio composition to examine relationships between human and more-than
human worlds. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Art and Performance at Deakin University, Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

10th March 2026

Watch the recording here

Grounded in posthumanism and ecofeminism, Amanda discussed how roleplay as a method for perspective shifts, creativity, and ecological reflection can help develop eco-literacy in education. After testing a sci-fi RPG in Danish schools, she reconsidered how imagination, embodiment, and eco-literacy are supported within current systems. Amanda argues that eco-literacy is not memorising facts, but cultivating creative, democratic, and emotionally engaged conversations and practices. Her research now turns to food as an overlooked yet powerful actor. What can an apple, a pig, or water teach us about interdependence, Indigenous knowledge, and living and dying well together in a more-than-human world?

Amanda Glob Nielsen completed her teacher education at Denmark’s first women’s teacher training college. There, she developed a sustained interest in critical pedagogy and anti-racist education. She later pursued
graduate studies in didactics. Her master’s thesis examined sustainability education and included an analysis of teaching materials across Denmark’s major educational resource databases. She subsequently worked as a research assistant on a project exploring education in regenerative mussel farming, conducting qualitative interviews with environmental educators. She later authored a comprehensive Scandinavian review on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). She is currently a PhD fellow at the University of Southern Denmark, researching role-play as a part of developing eco-literacy with pupils in the Danish upper primary
school.

26th February 2026

Watch the recording here

In this Futures Forum, Ethan unpacked his journey with the concept of regeneration and how his understanding of it has changed from working with Australian farmers, US ranchers, and on the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment. He explained the values underpinning regenerative agricultural systems.

Ethan Gordon is an environmental social scientist and President of the Australian Institute of Ecological Agriculture. His research explores agricultural regeneration and transformative change. This is important work to Ethan because it speaks directly to his family’s custodianship of Moffat Falls, a pastoral property located in the lands of the Dunghutti, Gumbaynggirr and Anaiwan Nations.