Dr Kathleen Hughes has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for a project exploring how Afrofuturism and Afro-diasporic science fiction can reshape thinking about the future of work.
This project builds on her PhD research at ARU and examines how literary and cultural imaginaries, particularly science fiction traditions rooted outside Western managerial norms, influence how work, organisation and technology are conceptualised.
Afrofuturism and Afro-diasporic science fiction, genres which reinsert Black voices, histories and futures into speculative narratives, offer alternative ways of imagining work, technology and social organisation, challenging dominant Silicon Valley-led visions of automation and artificial intelligence. Through analysis of literature, culture and management discourse, the project investigates how these genres and perspectives can illuminate overlooked social and ethical dimensions of work futures, including power, inequality and collective wellbeing.
By foregrounding imaginaries that sit outside the status quo, the research contributes to more inclusive, democratic and meaningful understandings of how work might be organised in the future.
'Fellowship for researcher studying future of work', ARU Press Office, 31 October 2025.