Author: Abril Chimal

by Mete Yazici  The ongoing phase of industrial transformation, known as the fourth industrial revolution, aims to merge the physical, digital, and biological domains through extensive digital innovation (Saldanha, 2019). The pervasive incorporation of digital technologies into all facets of human existence became particularly evident following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 (Hantrais et al., 2020). Moreover, there is tough competition for users’ loyalty. MindSea (2023) reports that there are tens of thousands of applications released on smartphones annually. A typical smartphone holds over 80 apps, yet nearly 40% are removed due to lack of use. Additionally,…

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by Catherine Flynn Working adults returning to school face unique challenges as they navigate their past, present, and future all at once. Like students of any age, they must learn unwritten rules, like how and when to reach out to professors and staff for help (Jack, 2016). Working adults may possess inaccurate ideas about their learning, which they may need to unlearn as they strive toward becoming expert learners who know which learning strategies best suit them (Rose et al., 2014). Fleener’s Futures Adult Learning Theory (FALT) (2021) establishes a current view of working adults’ perceptions of their probable futures.…

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Hi and welcome to the JFS Perspectives podcast! We’re excited to have you tuning in. This podcast is a new venture for JFS, aimed at reaching more people and giving you a glimpse of the incredible content featured in our quarterly publication.  We can’t wait to share some highlights with you and hopefully inspire you to check out the full issues. Episode 1: Barriers to LongTerm Visioning in Racial Justice Work Interviewees:  Hillary Carey & Alexandra To | Interviewers: José Ramos, Abril Chimal & Loes Damhof In this episode, we talk with Hilary and Alexandra about the challenges racial justice advocates…

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by Oliver Markley, PhD Introduction Many seemingly insurmountable challenges face the achievement of preferred futures that are economically just, ecologically sustainable, and socially inspiring (Markley, 2015, Inayatullah, 2018); for example, the way that social media algorithms drive increased social polarization. One of the founding tenets of the World Future Society (WFS) in 1966 was that a better future will emerge if many people explore their ideas about possible, probable and preferable, futures together—particularly about the specific types of future that they desire and/or see as most desirable for all. Whether this premise is something that holds up in practice, rather…

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Ivana Milojević, Sohail Inayatullah,  Ora-orn Poocharoen. A two-day workshop was held on 7-8 November 2023 and was facilitated by Professor Sohail Inayatullah and Dr. Ivana Milojević from Metafuture.org as well as Professor Ora-orn Poocharoen from the School of Public Policy, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. The workshop was attended by over sixty participants from diverse organizations in Thailand from governmental, academic, civil society, corporate, and non-governmental organization sectors. The purpose of the workshop was to use futures thinking to widen and deepen strategic conversations about the directions of public policy in Thailand. The School of Public Policy, Chiang Mai University and the…

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Karla Paniagua & Jose Antonio Sada Conjectures about the future of food are not new. Diverse studies outline a series of concerns and expectations that researchers and working groups in different geographies have raised about the availability and scarcity of commodities, significant changes in food practices, supply chain behavior, among other aspects of the complex food phenomenon: Los futuros de la alimentación en la CDMX (Arroyo, 2018); Co-Designing Water-Energy-Food Futures (Bell, 2018); The Future of Food – Who Will Be Hungry? (Russo, 2018); Imagining transformative futuresParticipatory Foresight for Food Systems Change (Hebinck, Vervoort, Hebinck, Rutting, & Galli, 2018); Eating…

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by Sohail Inayatullah and Satya Tanner Electrifying a Continent Nine years ago, while working for a large African national energy supplier, participants imagined a unique future for the continent. In their vision, every village would use solar with artificial intelligence and peer-to-peer energy networks to create a decentralized grid. Each village would have a storage battery. The energy company would become the platform connecting and electrifying the continent. They would move from being engineers to platform designers. Africa could become energy abundant, they believed. Traditional forms of energy would still be there, as needed, for backup. However, when they looked…

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by Matt Scott Inspection practices used internationally by the red meat industry date back to the late 1800’s, which can constrain innovative thinking within historical boundaries. This paper documents the beginning of a transformative journey for meat inspectors in New Zealand, by applying Futures Thinking to stimulate collaborative innovation. Interactive workshops with meat inspectors triggered a paradigm shift, redirecting the focus from automating conventional inspection methods to exploring uncharted territories. This shift revealed new possibilities for meat inspectors, by reimagining their roles in possible futures scenarios dominated by non-meat alternative proteins, and with integrated data negating the need for post-mortem…

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by Epaminondas Christophilopoulos The exploration of the future, a tradition as ancient as humanity itself, has evolved from oracular predictions to sophisticated, data-driven forecasts, reflecting a deep-rooted concern for what lies ahead. The 20th century’s broad use of “forecast” has given way to a focus on participatory, qualitative methods in futures studies, emphasizing the importance of foresight over prediction. This shift recognizes the future’s inherent uncertainty and the value of exploring different alternative futures to inform decision-making processes and improving futures literacy among organizations and societies, and in this direction, art can make a substantial contribution. Arts in various…

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by Karina Vega, Mercedes Baltazar, Patricia López, León Ruiz and José M. Ramos Echoing insights from critical Futures Studies (Sardar 1999), the cultural critic Mark Fisher (2014) argued that the future has been “canceled”, reflecting on our collective inability to imagine something beyond the current capitalist-industrial system. The epistemic boundaries of both action and reflection are maintained both by the political economy and the discourses in late capitalism. Trapped in a zeitgeist of constrained imagination and the “weight of the past” (Inayatullah 2008) we are often unable to develop alternative visions of futures which we would prefer to exist in.…

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