Dr Sakinah Alhadad: Toward collective hope and agency for marginalised learners in higher education - Transforming futures through Creative Critical Collective Futuring (3CF)

Abstract

Despite longstanding commitments to equity and widening participation, intersectionally marginalised students in higher education continue to face systemic barriers to belonging, wellbeing, and academic success. These barriers are not individual shortcomings but the result of systemic structures and cultures that actively reproduce exclusion.

While access to university and participation has broadened, the lack of structural and cultural transformation means these students remain disproportionately vulnerable to social isolation, compromised wellbeing, and attrition. Equity initiatives often target single categories of identity, overlooking how disadvantages intersect and compound. As a result, interventions remain fragmented and misaligned with students’ complex realities. The research challenge, thus, is how to redesign methodologies that reflect this complexity while enabling authentic perspectives and experiences to surface safely, in ways that support healing and hopeful imagination.

This presentation introduces Creative Critical Collective Futuring (3CF) as a framework and methodology for reimagining just futures in higher education. 3CF integrates social design-based experiments and cultural-historical activity theory, embedding equity and justice as central design principles. It extends these traditions by emphasising collective futuring practices, grounded in radical hope, in which staff and students imagine and embody restorative alternatives that connect past, present, and future.

By incorporating creative arts principles, 3CF engages cognition and emotion as deeply entangled processes of collective meaning-making. Drawing on qualitative research, we explore how 3CF generates powerful expressions of lived experience and shared critique, while enabling students and staff to co-create radically hopeful futures for higher education.

Bio

Dr Sakinah Alhadad is a Senior Lecturer in the Learning Sciences and Digital Educational Equity at Griffith University’s School of Education and Professional Studies and a member of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research. An interdisciplinary educator and researcher, her expertise spans psychology, the learning sciences, and education. Her program of work is committed to fostering dignity, well-being, belonging, and flourishing among intersectionally minoritised and racialised learners, treating educational inequities as social and historical problems that require justice-oriented solutions.

As a researcher, she is particularly interested in methodological approaches that can most generatively, authentically, and respectfully illuminate issues relevant to educational justice in learning and teaching.