#302: “Cows for Everyone”: Making the Case for the Speculative Approaches to Understanding Youth Reasoning

Understanding how youth reason about technology and society is essential for preparing them for uncertain futures. This paper uses an illustrative example to demonstrate how speculative interviewing techniques that ask youth to imagine future worlds activate different knowledge fragments than conventional methods, such as card sorting. Our methodological contribution suggests that incorporating speculative methods alongside traditional tasks reveals the complex, contextual nature of children’s socio-technical reasoning, offering researchers tools to access young people’s authentic perspectives.