What attracted you to the position and to LUCSUS?
– I had been curious about LUCSUS for a long time and even considered doing my masters in LUMES. When I saw the position, which focused on fossil free futures for the Swedish food system, I felt straight away that it was a good fit. I have been working with future visioning previously and in particular with creative futuring practices, and while I have limited experience of agriculture and food systems, I believe my approach to futuring can bring a lot to the research project.
What will you explore in your PhD studies?
– I will work with creative futuring and visioning methodologies to help people in the food and agriculture system imagine pathways to fossil free practices. In my masters, I worked with a method called Science-Fiction Prototyping, which I could see myself continuing with and developing further. This approach basically means you write short stories about the potential future, to enable exploration of complexities, nuances and the “grit” that you cannot capture within quantitative scenarios or descriptive visions. It’s Science-Fiction in that it is literally fiction based on science – you use a scientific baseline for your scenario world and then use creative writing tools to explore this future in narrative. The idea is that the stories should be provocative or “radical” in some kind of way, to generate reactions within readers. Most effective, in my experience, is to organise spaces where people can talk about the stories, like workshops, group interviews or mini book clubs. Their reactions can then tell you a lot of interesting things about the subject of the scenarios.
By using this or a similar approach, I hope to explore what kind of visions exist – or could exist! – for the Swedish food system, as well as what future visioning practices can help people think of more radical futures. My overall aim is to develop and refine these approaches so that they can aid in realising just sustainability transformations.
What is your background?
– My background is in environmental science, sustainability science and the history of ideas. I finished my masters in 2024 in social ecological resilience for sustainable development at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, SRC.
–During my master, and after, I worked at the SRC as a research assistant, focusing on projects on fisheries legislation and governance, and marine genetic resources.
What motivates you in your work?
– I am motivated by using creative futuring practices as a springboard for both action on and meaningful conversations about the polycrisis through which we are living.
I believe that future scenarios can help us imagine and think of radically different futures than our present realities, and I am convinced that creative practices can help us rethink injustices and unsustainabilities that we have learnt to take for granted. Future scenarios expressed through artistic practices naturally become spaces to think outside any current limitations; they allow us to focus on ethics, what a desirable society is or could be, and how to get there. As such, creative and artistic future visions are powerful tools in the transition because they allow us to be freer in what we imagine.
Tilde Krusberg will work in the project AgroDrive. It aims to facilitate the transition of the Swedish food chain to rely on fossil-free energy completely by 2050 and largely by 2030. The focus will be on supporting transformation to green logistics in food supply chains and enhance access to raw materials from agriculture for biofuel production. The project brings together LUCSUS, SLU Alnarp, RISE and a broad group of stakeholders in the food chain.
