This workshop was designed and facilitated by Dr Alice Brawley-Chesworth, Postdoctoral Researcher and representative on the DCU Institute for Climate and Society governing board and ENHANCE Researcher. She is the author of this report.
The DCU Institute for Climate and Society focuses on social science and humanities perspectives on the climate crisis. Every year, members who are early in their careers, defined as PhD students and post-doctoral researchers, gather for a day of activities. As the postdoctoral representative on the governing board, I worked with the PhD representative to plan the 2025 event. We used the Futures Workshop framework to help attendees envision the careers they want to create for themselves and identify some practical steps they can take to get started.
I called it a micro-future workshop because we only had three hours to work with. The event was held on 11 December 2025 and was divided into three roughly equal one-hour sessions, followed by lunch. Sixteen people attended, including three speakers who were not early in their careers. These speakers were included in the first two phases and left before the final phase began.
The workshop was adapted into three phases: Preparation, Critique, and a combined Fantasy and Planning phase.
The Preparation phase focused on helping participants feel comfortable and get to know each other. We began with a short welcome and introduction, explaining the main goals of the day: building connections and thinking about future careers. Most of this phase was spent on an introductory exercise designed to ensure everyone spoke with many people in the room. Participants tried to tick off items on a list using only one person per item. The list included personal experiences, family background, and personal characteristics. Besides breaking the ice, this allowed people to discover unexpected things they had in common, even if it was simply that they had both never learned how to swim.
This part of the day was very successful. People quickly began laughing together and finding shared interests. We discovered that nobody in the room had a tattoo, knew how to scuba dive, or had been skydiving, and a shared identity of ‘not being risk-takers emerged. Conversations during this phase revealed a common theme: the difficulty of being highly educated while having limited work experience, alongside the precarity of early-career academic employment. This led naturally into the critique phase.
The Critique phase combined reflection with conversations about career options. Three speakers were invited to talk about their post-PhD careers, sharing challenges, successes, and advice. Two were relatively early in their careers, while the third had completed a PhD after a career outside academia. A strong theme across all talks was flexibility and the importance of being open to unexpected opportunities, rather than focusing too narrowly on a traditional postdoc-to-professor pathway.
Due to time constraints, the Fantasy and Planning phases were combined. Participants wrote a newspaper article set in 2050 about their future selves receiving an award, using broad definitions of success such as solving societal problems, mentoring others, or contributing to a more just society. They then identified one or two actions they could take in the next three months to start moving in that direction.
While we did not collect these ideas, participants were highly engaged and supportive of one another. Overall, the workshop achieved what was possible within the limited time available and highlighted the potential value of making this type of reflective space a more regular feature in the future.
I think we were successful in accomplishing what we could in the time allotted without anything feeling rushed. I’m glad I did this workshop after our meeting in Kaunas, as hearing other researchers talk about how they were flexible with the structure helped me feel more comfortable changing things so that it fit the time and resources available.
