Conference Program

The ability to explore possible futures and make far-sighted choices is an essential competence in today’s world, marked by an unprecedented hyper-acceleration. In Italy, however, this competence is still less developed than in other countries. From this perspective, museums carry plural forms of knowledge, rooted in cultural heritages that reflect the essence of humanity and in processes of interpretation and accessibility, and thus in the very meaning of our society in the making. Museum contexts are places of elaboration and hope, able to inspire and nourish imagination and intuition, fostering semantic capital (Floridi 2025) and the shared creation of cultural artefacts oriented towards desirable futures through processes of collective intelligence enacted by citizens. In particular, this contribution explores a possible horizon that goes beyond the network of “museums of the future”, attempting to respond to the legitimate question (von Foerster 1987) that follows: why a museum of futures? After an initial premise examining national regulatory references and international documents on the future of new generations, the paper then presents the network of museums of the future and the main global experiences in which museums and hybrid spaces propose significant practices oriented towards Futures Literacy, promoted by UNESCO since 2012, and towards Futures Thinking (Aldford 2025). Finally, after outlining the Pedagogy of Beauty®, an educational approach that promotes learning through beauty understood as a transformative experience capable of awakening human potential and creating authentic connections (Perotti, Cusmai, De Laurentiis 2025), and in order to combine a methodological architecture that enables a virtuous relationship with Futures Literacy, the contribution presents the experience of The Human Safety Net, based in Venice. The workshop proposals planned for 2026, addressed to students, young changemakers, and the broader public, were centred on Futures Literacy as a methodological core, in coherence with the values promoted by the interactive exhibition A World of Potential, through which the importance of being aware of one’s potential, and of the right we all have to express and fully develop it, is shared. A play-oriented approach proved to be a significant support for the dissemination and pedagogical rooting of Futures Literacy: rather than treating anticipation as a specialist exercise, it transformed it into an inclusive, creative, and engaging experience. Within this perspective, it becomes possible not only to talk about alternative futures, but also to sense and imagine them together, opening the way to renewed possibilities for action in the present, including a Museum of Futures that investigates “the futures of society”, where futures act and take shape, and that takes sustainability as a guiding thread, making visible how every choice in the present (energy-related, social, educational, technological) opens up multiple futures, whether conflicting or inclusive.

In an age of rapid and unpredictable transformations, the crisis of the present increasingly appears as a crisis of imagination. Ecological, technological, and socio‑political dynamics escape linear interpretations and render static categories inadequate for understanding reality.

In this scenario, adult learning is no longer merely professional updating, but a space for developing the ability to navigate complexity and contribute to the construction of shared futures. This is where the figure of the “anticipatory citizen” evoked by Poli emerges: someone capable not so much of predicting the future as of cultivating a reflective and responsible stance toward what may come into being.

Democracy, too, must transform. A procedural democracy based on representation and formal participation is no longer sufficient; what is needed is a “deep” democracy, as suggested by Dewey and, more recently, by Escobar, one capable of recognizing situated knowledge, embodied relations, and the plurality of forms of life. A deep democracy does not merely manage the present; it nurtures plural and desirable futures, and adult education becomes one of the central mechanisms of this transformation.

Traditional models of training needs analysis, however, appear increasingly inadequate. Born in stable contexts, they identify gaps to be filled with already known competencies. In societies marked by uncertainty and interdependence, needs emerge before they become visible and evolve over time. A retrospective analysis risks chasing change rather than orienting it, producing reactive rather than anticipatory citizens.

According to futures studies, anticipation is not prediction but a social practice: exploring possible futures, questioning desirable ones, and acting in the present to influence what may happen. Applied to training needs, this implies a paradigm shift: not only asking “what do we need today,” but “what capacities allow us to inhabit and transform complex futures.” Needs are no longer deficits but potentials to be brought forth.

This perspective requires dialogic and inclusive processes that involve multiple actors and value marginalized forms of knowledge. The pluriversal societies described by Escobar cannot be understood through technocratic tools: they require listening, collective imagination, and recognition of interdependencies. Anticipatory needs analysis thus becomes an embodied process, attentive to emotions, lived experiences, and ecological and social relationships that shape adult experience.

The implications for educational design are profound: adaptive and iterative devices replace rigid and linear pathways, integrating experimentation, reflexivity, and situated learning.

Evaluation also changes, focusing not only on acquired competencies but on postures, the ability to read complexity, imagine alternatives, and act collectively. Educating becomes an act of future-making: giving people back the possibility to orient becoming, rather than merely endure it.

Adopting an anticipatory perspective in needs analysis is not a theoretical indulgence but an epistemological and political necessity. In complex and pluriversal societies, adult learning contributes to deep democracy only when it embraces the dimension of the possible. Anticipation thus becomes the lens through which to rethink training needs and the role of education in collective life.

In 2022, ICOM revised the definition of 'museum' to recognise its pluriversal role in society, stating that museums are accessible and inclusive.

Museums serve as sites of informal learning and social engagement, facilitating inclusive practices and community participation. As confirmed by international scientific literature, museums bridge divides, offer therapeutic benefits, and inspire innovation.

In Italy, the prevalence of autism is increasing and estimates indicate that 1 in 77 people have a diagnosis compared to 1 in 89 in Europe.

In 2023, the public health authority ULSS 3 Serenissima launched a call for proposals aimed at strengthening the social skills of autistic people. The Gruppo Asperger Veneto association (GAV) was awarded funding for an anticipatory project, originally developed as part of a Master’s thesis in Social Foresight, which proposed structured museum visits in Venice as tools for social empowerment.

A systemic approach is essential to address complex societal challenges. European policy increasingly promotes cross-sectoral integration linking culture, health, social policy, and education. On 5 February 2026, the Italian Ministers of Culture and Health signed a memorandum of understanding, paving the way for 'art on prescription'.

This paper explores how guided museum visits and creative workshops can improve social skills, communication, self-confidence and autonomy of autistic people. It emphasises the importance of providing people with ASD with opportunities to practice their social abilities in a safe environment. It highlights the necessity of a cross-sectoral collaboration in designing suitable measures to help autistic people prepare to lead independent lives, as outlined in their 'Project of Life'.

Results confirm that structured museum visits can effectively provide training in social exchange skills for the future. They foster communication, self-confidence, autonomy and social inclusion. They boost personal development and informally educate to broaden interests. Importantly, the project demonstrates how such museum-based interventions can serve as experiential laboratories for anticipatory citizenship, equipping autistic participants with the skills and capacities needed to navigate complex social contexts and participate meaningfully in social life. Exploratory Pathways in a Supportive Territory stands as an evidence-based model of cultural welfare, demonstrating how partnerships between health services and cultural institutions can enhance both individual and collective well-being.

In contemporary policy and educational discourse, democracy is increasingly framed using a growing vocabulary of resilience, participation, inclusion, empowerment and engagement. While this expansion of vocabulary is appealing in principle, it often coincides with democratic fatigue, epistemic fragmentation, the algorithmic mediation of public debate and the widening of socio-ecological inequalities. The result is a paradox: as democratic language intensifies, democratic imagination appears to shrink.

To capture this phenomenon, the paper introduces the notion of 'democrazy buzzwords': rhetorically powerful yet conceptually vague expressions that risk replacing democratic practice with symbolic performance. Drawing on critical scholarship concerning policy buzzwords and governance discourse, this concept serves as an analytical tool with which to examine the discrepancy between the normative vocabulary of democracy and the institutional and cognitive infrastructures necessary for its sustenance.

Against this backdrop, the paper presents FINNA (Fabiani & Cipriani, 2025) as a theoretical framework for democratic learning. Rather than presenting FINNA as a pedagogical toolkit, the framework is conceptualised as an epistemological architecture for anticipatory citizenship. The central argument is that, in complex societies, democracy depends not only on institutional arrangements, but also on learning environments that enable citizens to engage with uncertainty, negotiate differences, and take responsibility across temporal horizons.

The framework was developed through an integrative synthesis of scholarship in democratic theory, adult learning, and futures studies. FINNA articulates five interdependent epistemic dimensions — futures literacy, institutional reflexivity, narrative imagination, neuro-embodied awareness and action orientation — which connect anticipatory reflection with situated democratic practice.

Drawing on Deweyan pragmatism (Dewey, 2018), Freirean critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), pluriversal political theory (Escobar, 2020), and debates on futures literacy and anticipatory governance (Loudoun & Van Ruyskensvelde, 2025; Miller, 2018; Rosa, 2019; Artelaris & Mavrommatis, 2026 among others), this paper conceptualises democracy as an ongoing, anticipatory practice that is sustained through collective enquiry, rather than as a fixed institutional arrangement.

By advancing FINNA as a theoretical framework, the paper connects adult learning theory, democratic epistemology and futures studies. It argues that deep democracy in plural and uncertain societies hinges on cognitive and institutional infrastructures that can accommodate complexity without descending into polarisation, symbolic participation, or technocratic reductionism. From this perspective, adult education is not an auxiliary democratic function, but rather one of the conditions that enable democratic life.

Contemporary societies are marked by systemic complexity, instability, ecological transitions, technological acceleration and intensified globalisation that reshape economic, cultural and symbolic relations. In this interconnected environment, citizenship cannot be reduced to legal status or informed participation; it must be understood as an ongoing practice of interpretation, responsibility and anticipation. Becoming an anticipatory citizen requires developing critical, future-oriented reflexive capacities that enable individuals to recognise global interdependencies, question dominant narratives and contribute to sustainable democratic futures.

Within this framework, adult learning represents a cornerstone of deep democracy. It goes beyond transmitting knowledge to foster conscious and transformative action. Adult education creates spaces for developing systemic awareness and interpretive competencies needed to navigate a globalised world characterised by plural memories, identities and symbolic systems. Rather than adapting passively to change, individuals are encouraged to engage critically with complexity and assume responsibility within it.

From this perspective, the museum is not neutral but operates as a cultural and political device. It selects, organises and legitimises narratives, establishes hierarchies of value and determines what deserves remembrance and what may be marginalised. The museum does not simply preserve and display heritage; it symbolically produces it, shaping regimes of visibility and shared horizons of meaning. In doing so, it contributes to the construction of collective imaginaries and public discourse.

In a globalised society, this role becomes particularly significant. Museums bring histories, cultures and heritages from diverse contexts into dialogue, revealing connections that might otherwise remain unseen. They may reinforce identity closures or foster mutual understanding, consolidate singular narratives or open spaces for plural interpretations. Every curatorial decision is an act of cultural politics: to include or exclude, contextualise or naturalise, juxtapose or isolate is to construct a specific discursive framework. Within this symbolic power lies the museum’s transformative potential.

The embodied dimension of museum experience further reinforces this responsibility. Spatial arrangements, objects and exhibition strategies shape interpretive pathways and influence perception. Museum experience engages not only cognition but also the body, emotions and encounters with otherness. Through this interplay of symbolic and experiential dimensions, museums become environments for cultural exchange, adult learning and civic formation.

This perspective envisions a future museum aware of its cultural and democratic responsibilities: relational and dialogic, recognising visitors as co-interpreters; communicative and critically conscious of its semiotic strategies; adaptable to spaces, contents and diverse audiences; interconnected, capable of linking different heritages without reducing them to simplified narratives. Museum design therefore relies on an integrated semiotic and pedagogical approach, conceiving narratives as structures of meaning that generate questions and foster transformation.

Within this framework, digital technology plays an instrumental role. It functions as a mediating tool that articulates narrative layers, broadens access and encourages interaction without replacing the cultural project. Innovation lies in using digital media to deepen understanding and sustain participation rather than create spectacle.

Conceived in this way, the museum becomes a dynamic cultural device that produces meaning, shapes interpretation and supports democratic engagement, contributing to the formation of citizens capable of navigating the complexities of global society.

Exploring the contemporary meaning of a learning city through the case of the metropolitan area of Rome means interpreting it not as a simple metaphor, but as a political‑institutional space in which lifelong learning becomes an urban governance factor for societal and territorial transformation. The Metropolitan City of Rome Capital already possesses many of the characteristics identified by UNESCO for learning cities, but the true transformation lies in making learning a guiding principle of public policies and a transversal axis within strategies for innovation, sustainability, and inclusion. From this perspective, lifelong learning is not an additional service but a device capable of generating meaning, direction, and coherence in institutional decision‑making.

The learning city thus emerges as a democratic knowledge ecosystem, a place where experiences, distributed knowledge, social practices, and civic networks are connected, valued, and brought into dialogue. This network—understood as a “knowledge ecosystem”—integrates schools, universities, libraries, associations, enterprises, and citizens, recognizing the centrality of adults not only as beneficiaries but as protagonists of learning and as holders of educational rights across the life course. The establishment of the “Metropolitan Network of Lifelong Learning” signals a model of cooperative governance that broadens the range of actors and activates stable participatory processes.

At the same time, the learning city is a tool for countering inequalities and mending the urban fabric, reducing distances between central and peripheral areas, between generations, and between those who have access to knowledge and those who are excluded from it. Widespread learning acts as a connective tissue that helps individuals and communities to orient themselves within a society perceived as uncertain, providing competencies to face everyday challenges and to exercise conscious, active citizenship.

This approach becomes particularly relevant in the context of digital, ecological, and demographic transitions, which require anticipatory capacities at the territorial level. The learning city operates as a platform for collective preparedness for change: it promotes digital literacy, supports practices of social and environmental resilience, and offers public spaces where new ways of understanding the future can be experimented. The image of young people engaged in civil service, perhaps in a library, supporting disadvantaged individuals in the use of digital services while learning themselves through practice, conveys the tangible nature of the local learning ecosystem as a generative space of reciprocity and shared futures.

In this framework, the learning city shows conceptual affinities with deep democracy, understood as the plural and profound involvement of communities in decisions affecting them. The production of distributed knowledge, the centrality of adults as active subjects, and multilayered governance based on networks and participatory processes constitute elements that connect lifelong learning to a form of democracy that is rooted, dialogic, and capable of including the diversity, needs, and visions of citizens.

At a time of democratic erosion and socio-ecological instability, conservation needs to expand beyond formal settings and be reconceptualized as an embodied, relational, and future/anticipatory-oriented democratic practice. This paper proposes cultural heritage conservation as a site of anticipatory citizenship, where conservation expands beyond the preservation of material artefacts, to the negotiation of memory, identity, and collective futures.

Drawing on traditions of democratic education inspired by John Dewey and critical pedagogy as articulated by Paulo Freire, and integrating insights from anticipatory systems theory (notably Schwartz, Poli, Inayatullah), the paper argues that participatory conservation processes function as informal and indirect democracy environments. In contexts marked by dissonant heritage, post-disaster reconstruction, and contested narratives, this research aims to show that conservation can become a democratic laboratory where citizens can experience democracy: deliberate across difference, confront power asymmetries, and imagine, together, possible alternative futures.

Through a conceptual and practice-based workshop, the study examines how Strategic foresight applied to Conservation processes can cultivate anticipatory competencies: the capacity to navigate uncertainty, integrate risk awareness, assume responsibility toward present and future generations, expand imagination ability and critical thinking: the bases for a strong and multi-support democracy. By framing Conservation as an anticipatory governance interface between communities and public institutions, the paper contributes to debates on how adult can bridge civic participation and democratic decision-making.

Rather than treating heritage as a static legacy of the past, this research reimagines conservation as a generative act for the future – an embodied, adult pedagogical process through which plural memories are negotiated and democratic agency is explored. In doing so, it proposes a model of deep democracy grounded in material practice, relational engagement, and shared responsibility in complex and uncertain societies, such as the our own.