Dr Sakinah Alhadad: Attuning to time: Using Creative Critical Collective Futuring to understand belonging and possible futures

Abstract

How might attending to the ways people experience, inhabit, and imagine time deepen our understanding of wellbeing and belonging? Psychological research has long recognised humans' remarkable capacity for mental time travel – revisiting the past, anticipating the future, and imagining possibilities beyond the present. Yet, these temporal experiences are neither individually constituted nor socially neutral. They are shaped by histories, identities, relationships, and the institutional conditions that make certain futures more imaginable, accessible, or attainable than others.

In this seminar, I introduce temporal attunement as an emerging theory-method developed through Creative Critical Collective Futuring (3CF), a justice-oriented participatory methodology. 3CF brings together psychological understandings of mental time travel and future-oriented cognition with sociocultural, critical, and design-based perspectives, inviting participants to move across pasts, presents, and possible futures through creative, embodied, and collective practices. Temporal attunement attends to how pasts, presents, and anticipated futures become entangled in lived experience, and to how people’s sense of possibility is shaped through the interaction of memory, identity, relationships, institutional rhythms, and social positioning.

Drawing on research with intersectionally marginalised university students, I will share emerging findings on belonging and wellbeing that became visible when participants were invited not simply to describe their experiences, but to move across time collectively: revisiting formative moments, tracing the temporal conditions of university life, and imagining more just and liveable futures. These encounters revealed belonging and wellbeing as temporal as well as relational phenomena, shaped by what participants carry from the past, how they experience the present, and whether they can locate themselves within futures that feel possible, meaningful, and worth moving towards.

Finally, I will argue that temporal attunement offers psychology a way of studying experience that is simultaneously cognitive, relational, cultural, and institutional, while 3CF provides a methodological means for making these temporal dynamics visible and collectively thinkable.

Bio

Dr Sakinah Alhadad is a Senior Lecturer in Learning Sciences and Digital Educational Equity at Griffith University and a member of the Griffith Institute for Educational Research. Her interdisciplinary research spans psychology, the learning sciences, and education, examining how social and institutional conditions shape belonging and flourishing for intersectionally marginalised students and educators. Sakinah co-leads Griffith’s Transdisciplinary Flourishing Futures Lab, where she supports research and emerging scholars working across disciplinary boundaries to imagine and design more just and flourishing futures. Her scholarly leadership extends to advancing equity and justice within universities and the learning sciences field. She is Deputy Chair of the Arts, Education and Law Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee at Griffith University and a standing member of the Equity and Justice Committee of the International Society of the Learning Sciences. Across over a decade in higher education, her work has connected research, curriculum and pedagogical innovation, disciplinary leadership, and institutional change to expand the conditions through which diverse learners can participate, belong, and flourish.