Sachiko Ishihara

Uppsala University | UU · Department of Social and Economic Geography

This essay provokes who the “experts” are in discussions about education: why not the students who are most impacted by it? At the Centre for Environment and Development Studies (CEMUS), a joint centre between Uppsala University and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, students are hired as Course Coordinators (CCs) to develop and facilitat...

Greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise despite domestic and international efforts to mitigate climate change. Recent scholarship has expressed concerns that academic careers require considerable amounts of air travel. These trends raise a series of ethical dilemmas for academic geographers who conduct international field research. Building...

Excessive global resource use is a major driver of ecological breakdown and biodiversity loss. To start envisioning democratic and sustainable futures we must question the assumptions behind endless economic growth. This article reflects on the use of a novel seed pathways methodology during a workshop in the Degrowth Vienna 2020 conference. The fr...

What is a good life? What role does place play in this? The question of what kind of life we want and where we want to live has been guided by ideas and discourses around 'development' and 'economic growth.' People move to the cities to get a 'good job' and live the city life that offers economic and material prosperity, which is supposed to enrich...

How can education train imagination and creativity to think about ‘the future we want?’ How can we create learning experiences to head towards these desirable futures? In this chapter, we explore backcasting as a pedagogical practice in the group project ‘Back from the Future We Want’, as a part of the interdisciplinary student-led course ‘Global C...

This study explored the nature of Future Session workshops in current Japan by identifying the motivations, conducting analysis from the point of view a deliberative democracy, and examining the potentials for developing future visions of society. Four workshops were targeted that dealt with a wide range of societal problems and commonly challenged...