An Educations for the Future MANIFESTO — Keynote abstracts

Sensuous Society
by Gry Worre Hallberg
Founder and Artistic Director of Sisters Hope (DK)

Gry Worre Hallberg will unfold the thinking behind a potential future society that she terms Sensuous Society. Here within its ability to reshape education and society through immersive performance art practices. With the vision of a Sensuous Society, Hallberg seeks to move beyond current economic rationality and suggest a sensuous mode of being in the world. This concept is unfolded in the artistic manifestations of Sisters Hope, as well as Hallbergs ongoing research projects, including her PhD dissertation and TEDx talks.

Hallberg will emphasize the ability of performance art to create profound societal change by challenging traditional modes of engagement and knowledge creation. This is the starting point of the performance work Sisters Academy that manifests in two different formats; The Takeover and The Boarding School. In The Takeover the performance group takes over the leadership of real upper secondary schools and leads them from the premise that we are now at the school in a Sensuous Society – A new world governed by the aesthetic dimension rather than economic rationality. In The Boarding School an art institution is transformed into a complete poetic boarding school positioned in the Sensuous Society. To participate the audience will enroll as students at the school, where they will stay for a minimum of 24 hours. During their stay they will participate in performative exercises exploring more poetic premises for being and being together.

In her PhD dissertation, Hallberg argues that to move towards a sustainable future, we must stimulate a deep understanding of the interconnectedness of everything. This can be achieved through ‘aesthetic inhabitation’, where individuals inhabit the sensuous and poetic modes of being more permanently, beyond temporary participation. Hallberg has thus coined ‘Inhabitation’ as a new artistic paradigm moving beyond both spectatorship and temporary participation.

Hallberg’s keynote will conclude with the Poetic Self Exercise where the participants in a guided meditation are invited to explore their inner poetic landscapes.

Letting Arts Transform: Making the Case with Eruptive Education Practices
by Pamela Burnard
Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations at University of Cambridge (UK) Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching

Our era is marked by urgent crises that affect community health, well-being, and especially the emotional landscape of children and young people who experience grief, anxiety, and disenchantment. However, when hope for the future is fostered, individuals can thrive, and communities can sustain themselves. In this talk I will make the case for how eruptive education practices foster hope and address these urgencies through transformative arts practice.

I will share research on how arts generate intellectual, social, cultural and emotional renewal; where the interdependence of disciplines function as both an intellectual and emotional catalyst that open spaces for educator, practitioner, researcher collaboration sustained over time. 

Art and Existential Resilience: Three Lessons from the Realm of Aesthetics
by Max Liljefors
Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Lund University (SE)

Humans created art tens of thousands of years before we learned how to cultivate crops or to build houses, and since then, the arts have been part of all human cultures through golden eras as well as crises. From this we can conclude that aesthetic creativity is a need and an ability deeply wired into the fabric of which we are made.

In recent years, research in the medical and health sciences has shown that creative and aesthetic experiences can help us to heal from illness, recover from loss, and find meaning, hope, and beauty in the face of hardship and difficulties. In other words, the aesthetic is part of the foundation in us which affords us what is called ‘existential resilience’.

This talk brings together recent findings from medical and neuroscientific research with insights from the history of philosophy and art to explore how the arts can contribute to existential resilience today. Society is plagued by galloping sick leave numbers due to stress and mental illness, and the healthcare and school sectors are the hardest hit. This crisis, which is made worse by the looming threat of ecological and societal collapse, has been called an epidemic of alienation and loss of meaning.

In the face of this crisis, the true potential of the arts emerges into view, because they spring from our wired-in ability to create connection and meaning. Taking the promise of art seriously, this talk proposes three crucial lessons we can learn from the realm of aesthetics to foster existential resilience. 

The Future of Education: Pedagogies of the Possible
by Vlad Glaveanu – online presentation
Professor of Psychology at Dublin City University (IE)

As we navigate a brave new era marked by rapid technological advancement, global interconnectedness, and unprecedented societal shifts, the future of education demands new frameworks and innovative pedagogical approaches. “Pedagogies of the Possible” explores how learners, educators, policymakers, and society as a whole can harness emerging tools and methodologies to foster adaptive, inclusive, and future-oriented learning environments. 

This keynote addresses the urgent need for education systems to evolve beyond traditional models and truly embrace possibility-oriented processes such as creativity, imagination, wonder, and futures thinking. To achieve this, we need to pivot from a model of education as sameness and reproduction — where students are tasked primarily with memorising and regurgitating information — toward a model of education as difference and possibility, where learners creatively engage with new circumstances, opportunities, and choices. 

This keynote will highlight how technology and new pedagogical methods — like Possibility Spaces — can facilitate this shift, enabling students to learn in ways that reflect the fluidity of real-life situations. By blending personalised learning pathways, collaborative problem-solving, and tools like AI and virtual environments, educators can create spaces where learners are not just absorbing facts but engaging with possibilities. In this context, we need to carefully examine the shifting role of educators from content deliverers to facilitators of inquiry, imagination, and collaboration. The future of education lies in equipping learners and teachers not just with knowledge, but with the skills to navigate complex, ever-changing global challenges. This involves fostering interdisciplinary thinking, digital literacy, empathy and perspective-taking. 

Ultimately, “Pedagogies of the Possible” is a call to action for stakeholders at every level to rethink the purpose and processes of education. By integrating technology, fostering equity, and prioritising student agency, we can cultivate a generation of learners capable of shaping a more just, sustainable, and innovative future. This keynote is an open invitation to envision, together, an education system that is flexible, responsive, and attuned to the possibilities of tomorrow.