Speculative ecologies: Imagining futures for higher education in a postdigital world through the lens of ‘lichen’

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of speculative ecologies as a mode of reimagining the futures of higher education through the figure of the ‘lichen’. Drawing on posthumanist and ecological thought, it argues that lichens (composite, slow-growing, and symbiotic) offer a generative counter-image to the neoliberal university, whose logics of competition, acceleration, and individualism have narrowed the horizon of institutional possibility. Rather than proposing a programmatic model of reform, the paper mobilises lichen as a speculative device that expands the imaginative field through which universities can be understood and inhabited. By foregrounding interdependence, vulnerability, and co-emergence, speculative ecologies invite educators and scholars to rethink academic identity, labour, and institutional life as relational achievements embedded within wider social and ecological worlds. The paper contributes to contemporary debates on utopia as method, offering lichen as a material-matterphorical resource for cultivating alternative educational futures grounded in care, endurance, and collective flourishing.