The workshop departed from the finding that digital citizenship requires the capacity to imagine alternative futures; to think beyond conventional models of participation, governance, and agency in increasingly datafied environments. The workshop explored methods to facilitate this process through a step-by-step structure.

We combined anthropological observation with speculative practices, guiding participants to identify newly emerging questions and ground cinematic fabulations into their lived experiences. Participants learned to translate their scenarios through both narrative and sensory entry points, allowing audiences to feel the texture of possible worlds rather than understand them solely in conceptual terms. Many noted that speculative cinema, precisely because of its emotional and immersive affordances, felt like an effective way of having an impact across cultures and languages.

According to our initial analysis, a number of insights on methodology emerged:

• A growing sense of agency and hopefulness: Participants reported that the creative and speculative nature of the process expanded their sense of what is possible and increased confidence in imagining alternative futures.

• Value of learning-by-doing: The iterative, experimental approach – prioritising process over polished output – was new for many but considered highly generative. Limited resources and a tight timeframe paradoxically encouraged risk-taking and progress over perfection.

• Critical importance of guidance: While constraints were motivating, moments of being “stuck” required timely facilitation. Participants highlighted these interventions as crucial for navigating unfamiliar creative methods.

• Complementarity of creation and reflection: The combination of intense hands-on filmmaking with pair and group discussions produced a productive interplay between intuition and analysis. Several participants noted that time and post-workshop reflection helped them to fully access and consolidate their insights.

• Situated imaginaries: The workshop design – inviting participants to imagine how people and communities close to them might act in speculative situations – reinforced a grounded, situated orientation.

Taken together, these methodological findings suggest that speculative cinema workshops can serve as a research practice for cultivating imaginative, critical, and affective forms of digital citizenship: a mode of inquiry that supports agency, emotional engagement, and cross-species intelligibility.

Across the resulting speculative cinema works, questions of more-than-human agency and mediated relationships emerged as recurring threads. Participants explored how digital systems, infrastructures, and ecological networks co-produce forms of perception, responsibility, and vulnerability that extend beyond the human.

Following our initial analysis, several thematic insights became especially prominent:

• Imaginaries shaped by the current polycrisis: Every film addressed concerns such as climate breakdown, ecological collapse, political polarisation, untrustworthy information, unsustainable demands for growth, and the erosion of human connection; either through over-reliance on technology or disconnection from ecological systems.

• Friction instead of utopia: None of the scenarios were purely utopian (or dystopian). Participants intuitively included tensions, risks, and unintended consequences; the workshop explicitly encouraged this recognition of complexity as a crucial part of imagining alternative futures.

• Artificial intelligence as a mediator: AI was the most frequently referenced technology, treated as an ambiguous, wide-ranging system that could be embedded anywhere, at times even possessing personality or emotion. In the films, AI often appeared as a mediating entity: between humans, between humans and other living beings, between humans and places, or between AI systems themselves.

• Co-produced relations of care and attention: The works examined how sensors, platforms, and algorithms shape relations of care and interdependence, blurring the boundaries between technological mediation and lived experience.

Together, these explorations suggest that imagining alternative digital futures requires rethinking the distributed, more-than-human conditions of citizenship itself. The participants’ situated, affect-rich, and sometimes uneasy visions give a glimpse of how future digital citizenship might be shaped as much by ecological entanglements and mediated relationships as by governance structures or rights frameworks.