Summer School: Planetary Futures

Estrid Sørensen is Professor for the Anthropology of Knowledge at the Ruhr University Bochum. She has done extensive ethnographic research within the field of digital science and technology studies, including on educational technologies, cultures of media harm, epistemologies of digital data and on scientific data infrastructures, particularly on data centres. Her recent speculative ethnography ”Staying with the Planet” engages critically with scientific data infrastructures and their planetary relations.

 Joost Vervoort is Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University, member of the EU Horizon project STRATEGIES, and Impact Director for All Will Rise. Joost has a long background in sustainability, systems complexity and future scenarios, but has in the last 10 years focused on what futures are being imagined in culture and media, with a special focus on video games. His particular interest is in how creative sectors can contribute to societal transformations.

Lukáš Kolek is the co-founder and CEO of Charles Games, a Prague-based studio behind award-winning games such as Playing Kafka, Svoboda 1945: Liberation, We Grew Up in War, and Beecarbonize, played by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. He has been creating computer and board games for over 14 years, focusing on game design and production, and his PhD research underpins the studio’s evidence-based approach to games on serious topics with a positive social impact. Lukáš also teaches game design at Charles University and serves on the board of the Czech Game Developers’ Association.

Stefan Werning is working as an Associate Professor for Digital Media and Game Studies at Utrecht University, where he founded the Utrecht Game Lab and co-coordinates the Green Media Studies Initiative. He previously worked as an Assistant Professor for Digital Media at the universities of Bayreuth and Bonn as well as at the Fraunhofer Institute Media Communications in St. Augustin. During his PhD trajectory, Stefan worked in the digital games industry, most notably at Codemasters (2005) and Nintendo of Europe (2007-2009). Since completing a DAAD-funded visiting scholarship at MIT (2006), he has been a fellow of the Convergence Culture Consortium. Stefan’s last monograph Making Games was published by The MIT Press in 2001, his last edited volume (together with Joost Raessens and Laura op de Beke) on Ecogames was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024.

Joost Raessens holds the Chair of Media Theory at the Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, he coordinates the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES: Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries (2024–2028), and is a member of the Supervisory Committee of CIIIC: the Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition (2026-2029). His research examines how games and extended reality (VR, AR, MR) can both raise climate awareness and encourage sustainable behavior, while also assessing the ecological footprint of these technologies in the context of the climate crisis. More broadly, he investigates how immersive experiences—such as games and XR for change—can contribute to advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Paweł Frelik is Associate Professor and the Co-Leader of Speculative Texts and Media Research Group at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. His teaching and research interests include cultures of speculation, science fiction, video games, and fantastic audiovisualities.