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About this Project
About this Project
My research assesses the potential of World Expos to engage global publics in crafting, sharing, and discussing shared futures. Combining research in the field at Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai, archival and promotional material, and interviews, this project explores the stories told at Expos and how they are told.
Research Questions
What stories are told at Expos?
What are the techniques used to tell stories and engage visitors?
Who participates in Expos? (Who tells the stories? Who is represented? Who engages with the stories?)
Why Expos?
World Expos are places where stories are told about the future in spectacular, multi-sensory, and deeply moving ways. In addition, there are a wide variety of stories. At the most recent Expo 2020 in Dubai, 192 countries hosted pavilions spotlighting technological innovations, cultural displays, art, and sustainability solutions. Rather than offering a unified narrative, the multiplicity of voices at an Expo can help participants envision a world where many worlds fit.
Past Work
Past Work
Expo as Futures Lab
Expo as Futures Lab
This site richly illustrates our concept of Futures Lab with examples from pavilions from Expo2020 Dubai. We provide more in-depth portraits of the pavilions of Morocco and Germany, as well as glimpses from of 25 others.
A Trip Through Tomorrowland
A Trip Through Tomorrowland
This paper for a special issue of World Futures Review presents our concept of the Futures Lab as embodied in pavilions at a World Expo.
Abstract: To shape just and equitable futures in which we all flourish, we need visions crafted by a broader range of voices that acknowledge everyone’s stake and account for the creativity, ingenuity, and place-based knowledge of everyday life around the planet. In addition, experiential and inclusive environments for imagining futures on a large scale are needed. We propose a concept of Futures Labs as plural, interactive, relational, cross-temporal, and immersive spaces for crafting, experiencing, and deliberating the futures we need. We analyze World Expos as one potential site in which to implement this concept based on our own experiences at the Expo2020 in Dubai. We discuss how aspects of Expos already meet the criteria of a Futures Lab and make proposals for ways to iterate this “lab” and enhance the role of World Expos in shaping global futures ahead of the upcoming 2025 Expo in Osaka, Japan.
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