Professor Keri Facer

Keri's research aims to understand processes of social learning that can help to achieve ecologically and socially sustainable transformation. Her core research focus is what she calls the 'temporal imagination' - how ideas of the future, of time and change more generally inform the perception of possibilities in the present. Her practice comprises ethnography, learning histories, and collaborative research, in particular developing new practices and research methods to bring diverse experiences and worldviews into dialogue to open up new forms of collective learning and experimentation.

Her current projects include the British Academy ‘Times of A Just Transition’ programme, which brings together scholars from 6 continents and 14 disciplines, to explore how temporal assumptions, frames and processes structure the possibility of just transitions; and the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, where she works on the implications of mixed reality tools for collective imagination.

Her ongoing collaborations include partnerships with the Swedish Agricultural University to develop a ‘Society for Transformative Conversation’, and with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, to develop a theory and practice of ‘Imagination Infrastructure’. In recent years, she has been working to explore the possibility of transforming education to more actively resource ecologically and socially sustainable transitions - both in partnership with Black Mountains College and Cardiff University and as leadership fellow for the AHRC Connected Communities Programme, as well as member of the core writing team for the UNESCO Futures of Education Commission.  She leads a lively network of doctoral students and post docs working on social learning, possibility and transformation.

In 2026, she is consolidating this work in three landmark publications: Chronoberg: a handbook of creative methods for temporal imagination (with Johannes Stripple); ‘Time & Possibility: A Field Guide’ (with Harriet Hand); and Temporal Justice, a Special Issue for the Journal of Global Social Challenges. 

She has worked with organisations from the BBC, the UK’s Department for Education and Electronic Arts to local city farms, ecovillages and community organisations, and been a visiting professor at Uppsala, Gothenburg and SLU universities. 

My books include ‘Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change’ and ‘Working with Time in Qualitative Research’. I am joint Editor-in-Chief of the Journal Futures and edit the Routledge Book Series on Futures and Anticipation with Prof Johan Siebers.

You can find more publications, including early versions of upcoming work, archived talks and emerging ideas on my personal website: https://kerifacer.wordpress.com/

Current and recent PhD students have focused on topics such as: learning in ecovillages; facilitating dialogue around racial justice in land rights movements; the role of the body in social transitions practices; how school children imagine the future; the experiences of autistic children in natural environments; the rise of big data in schools; students confronting difference in post-soviet states.

I will now only accept PhD students working in the following areas: 

• Education and Climate Change/ Challenges of the Anthropocene
• Time and Education
• Universities and social learning for transformation. 
• Informal learning and popular education in relation to social transformation
• Education and Sustainable Development/Sustainable Futures
• Intersections between education, imagination and technological change (particularly virtual/immersive/mixed realities) 
• Education & authoritarianism