Conference Program

In the age of artificial intelligence, digital innovation is often framed as neutral and efficiency-driven. Such narratives risk fostering passivity, epistemic homogenization, narrowing of imagination, and the erosion of democratic agency in new generations. Education, therefore, cannot be limited to integrate AI as an instructional resource or as a necessary skill to be taught; it must cultivate the individuals’ capacity to interrogate, reappropriate, and reshape technologies in light of social justice and democratic values. What is needed is to foster a critical culture of digital innovation.

Starting from the definition of a theoretical framework that integrates critical pedagogy, futures studies and sustainable digital innovation, the paper conceptualizes education as a cultural and political space where technologies can be understood through the lenses of social justice and democracy. Innovation processes, particularly those related to AI, need to be examined in relation to the values they embed and reproduce: they may reinforce inequalities, undermine human dignity and environmental sustainability, or alternatively become drivers of justice, cohesion and ecological responsibility.

Within this perspective, schools are not merely sites of technological adoption but spaces of democratic imagination where pedagogical practices cultivate students’ critical and anticipatory capacities. Drawing on Futures Studies, these approaches encourage learners to question existing technological paths and to imagine more just alternatives. This perspective advances a dual trajectory: supporting both teachers and students in developing critical and anticipatory competences while engaging in educational pathways oriented toward emancipation and the co-construction of more equitable technological futures.

Central to this approach is to use “possible futures” as pedagogical spaces. Through anticipatory methodologies, such as speculative design, learners are fostered to imagine desirable futures grounded in democratic values and social justice and to identify pathways towards their realization. This process nurtures students and teachers’ ownership and agency over the socio-technical systems that shape their lives, cultivating plural imaginaries and critical reasoning that resist algorithmic standardization. Within this perspective, convivial futures can be understood as both a pedagogical horizon and a methodological tool: collective futures explored through educational practices that enable individuals to question, reinterpret, and reshape technological innovation in light of democratic and socially just values.

The paper briefly discusses the InspAIr laboratory as an exploratory application of this conceptual and methodological framework. In this experience, teachers and students collaboratively engage in speculative and critical inquiry around AI systems, highlighting embedded biases, power structures and sustainability implications. This pedagogical practice illustrates how convivial futures pedagogies can translate theoretical principles into concrete educational processes.

Ultimately, the contribution argues that cultivating a critical culture of digital innovation among young generation is not simply an educational innovation, but a democratic necessity and urgency. By reconnecting technological development to the foundational values of social justice, plurality and collective responsibility, education can help reconfigure AI towards convivial futures that sustains democratic non-homogenization.