Based on the critique of education for sustainable development (ESD) as a socio-political control element of ecological modernisation, we discuss the prefigurative potential of participatory photovoice research in schools in light of social-ecological transformation. We argue that engaging students in prefigurative practices of change in which (sustainable) counter-futures are explored in the (unsustainable) present can help to re-politicise ESD, and we view photovoice as a way to guide this transformative process. Drawing on examples from a participatory research project on the transformation of local food systems in Graz, Austria, we critically explored photovoice as a method of transformative education that creates power-critical spaces of possible futures in which (un)sustainable hegemony and collectively internalised patterns of thought and action can be questioned to envision and negotiate liveable futures for all.

The protests of the Arab Spring sparked hope for a democratic breakthrough in a region long known for its durable systems of authoritarian rule, but optimism soon turned to disappointment. This article argues that the main problem with the post-Arab Spring narrative of failure and regression is that it equates democratization with regime change and places too great a causal burden on protests as the route to its achievement. It proposes that democratization can be understood as a multivalent process encompassing changes occurring at different registers, spurred by different causal mechanisms, and according to different time lines, rather than as a fixed package of changes that proceed in unilinear fashion from different variants of authoritarianism towards a common democratic finish line. Thinking about democratization differently alerts us to vectors of change we might otherwise fail to notice and enables us to move beyond the over-generalizations and over-simplifications that arise when we focus solely on (changes in) macro structures and relations of power.