Finishing Each Other’s Futures: Collaborative Education Fiction Writing as Postdigital Inquiry into AI and Education

Abstract This article presents a collaborative speculative writing exercise in which international educators and researchers imagined the future of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in education through three fictional scenarios. The exercise employed a relay structure: one participant began each story, and a different participant completed it. After the stories were finished, all participants read the scenarios they had not written and responded to a set of reflective questions. We treat the resulting scenarios and reflections as a qualitative, multi-voiced dataset and read them through a light analytical framework centred on postdigital temporality, relay discontinuity and recurring thematic tensions. The scenarios explore a GenAI-free Reset Day in a corporate training centre, a family navigating educational choices with the help of a GenAI assistant, and an underground school resisting a fully automated world. Situated within the postdigital condition, the article engages education fiction as a mode of collective inquiry that enacts the entanglement of human and technological agency it seeks to explore. The relay handoff introduced productive friction, and the reflections surfaced recurring questions about dependency, listening, measurement and the difficulty of translating situated, story-based imaginaries into policy recommendations. The contribution is both methodological, in theorising relay-based education fiction writing, and analytical, in showing how familiar postdigital concerns are reassembled through collaborative fictional handoffs.