by Aubrey Yee
Introduction
When Seongwon Park approached me last Spring with the idea for a student led Futures Studies conference, I was all for it. We realized that nothing like this had been done before, at least by Futures’ students, and we both saw the great potential of bringing together young futurists to network and learn amongst one another. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Seongwon completed his PhD and earned a position as a professional futurist in Korea before he was able to realize his vision. Picking up the torch of an idea, a group of Mānoa School futures’ students got together and worked diligently for many months to make the Emerging Futures and Futurists Symposium (a.ka. The Mānoa Futures Symposium) a reality. We sent out a call for papers to over 40 worldwide futures studies programs and received numerous interesting and worthy proposals. With just one day of time allotted for presentations and a limited amount of funding for travel scholarships, the committee carefully organized a dynamic program.(continue…)