Ivana Milojević, Marcia Chen & Sissi Wu On May 28, 2026, the Women Alliance Group (WAG) convened a workshop in Shanghai on gender partnership and futures thinking, held at Sanofi’s venue with support from its Gender+ employee business resource group. Using Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) (Inayatullah, 2008) – moving through the four layers of litany, system, worldview, and myth/metaphor – this Perspectives article examines how a seemingly simple participation paradox can reveal deeper possibilities for transforming gender partnership in workplace futures. Around twenty participants joined from companies and organisations including PTC, Labcorp, Merck China, Decathlon, Sanofi, Baker Hughes, Schneider Electric,…
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Sohail Inayatullah, Mykola Kyrchenko, Olha Petroye, and Olha Prosina Introduction: Imagining Beyond the Bunker On July 9, 2026, along with local colleagues I, Sohail Inayatullah, facilitated a workshop on the future of education in Kyiv. The context was brutal, with the possibility of workshop setting being bombed. While we had worked in Croatia after the war, this was different as the war was present. What I learned from other encounters in challenging places – war zones, or communities battling with collective depression and fatigue (farming federations) or organizations where the future was not a possibility but a site of fear…
by Abril Chimal & José Ramos Introduction The history of Latin America can be read as a succession of geopolitical projects and processes of colonization. For more than a century, the region has lived under forms of neocolonial control imposed by the United States: from the Monroe Doctrine to Cold War counterinsurgency, and from there to current forms of financial, technological, and cultural influence, such as structural adjustment programs. The hemisphere has been framed time and again as a space in need of stabilization, protection, or ideological alignment. Military interventions and economic conditionalities are well documented. Less attention has been…
by José Maria Ramos 1. A Vision for a Different Hemisphere Bad Bunny skips across the Super Bowl halftime field, dancers behind him carrying the flag of every country in the Americas. “This is America,” he declares, the hemisphere as one community rather than a hierarchy. That claim runs against five hundred years of history. Quijano (2000) called this history the coloniality of power: a racial and geographic order that puts North above South, and European above Indigenous and African. The empires that built the order are gone, but the order remains. The Americas have kept producing alternatives to it,…
by Felipe Bosch From institutions to infrastructures of affect: what does Latin America bring as a method? In some parts of the world, one of the defining revelations of today’s transformations is the gradual displacement of liberal institutions as the exclusive organizers of meaning and coordination. This does not mean that institutions have become irrelevant. Rather, it points to the coexistence—and often competition—with other systems of organization that are less visible but more immediately effective in structuring everyday life. These can be described as affective-symbolic infrastructures of subjectivation and futurity in their capacity to organize attention, identity, belonging, aspiration, and…
by Tatyane Ramos This intimate-critical essay explores what futures become possible when family archives, Black domestic memory, and handmade datasets are treated not as nostalgic materials, but as infrastructures for questioning and engaging in dialogue with the formation of human and machine imaginaries. What world emerges when we refuse to live within a linear path of erasure and allow time to dance? In the boxes of photographs kept in my great-aunt’s house, I find not only fragments of my family’s life. I also find a technology of permanence and care. What I can now call a handmade dataset, I also…
by Karla Paniagua, Introduction Trend analysis identifies and interprets geographically localized patterns of change expressed in the behavior of specific social groups. These patterns involve shifts in conduct and idiosyncrasy that have tangible manifestations. This approach aligns with Mary O’Hara-Devereaux’s Law of the Future, which states that significant events must begin somewhere. The same exercise can work in two opposite directions. Read as one conjecture among several, a trend widens the field of what may happen. When read as a forecast whose method and point of enunciation remain undeclared, however, it narrows the field. It delivers what Inayatullah (2008)…
by Pablo & Lorenza Reyes Introduction: Used futures internalized as epistemology Latin America’s contemporary history reveals itself not only through material interventions—from the Monroe Doctrine’s territorial declarations, through Cold War counterinsurgency operations, structural adjustment programs of the 1980s-90s, to today’s lithium megaprojects across the Andean salt flats—but through the interpretative frameworks that render certain futures thinkable while actively excluding others as irrational, unfeasible, or merely “cultural.” These frameworks operate as “used futures” (Inayatullah, 2008), delimiting possibility horizons before analysis even begins. Chile’s Salar de Atacama—ground zero for global lithium extraction supplying 30% of world demand—crystallizes this dynamic. The Chilean Economic…
by Estefania Simon-Sasyk, Constanza Díaz del Castillo, Mónica Sahmkow, Dharath Hoonchamlong 1. The kitchen as futures factory Culinary schools are a tangible case of futures factories: they reproduce ways of eating, cooking, and valuing food that shape the material and symbolic orders of the societies they serve. The programs taught in these institutions are typically based on European culinary practices that were globally considered the epitome of excellence. This has led to the marginalization of local knowledges, ingredients, and food cultures. Students are trained to relate good cuisine with these standards and to aspire to a world that is neither…
By Helena Rojas “On a moonlit night in the mountains of Chiapas, Xunka’s dream gave rise to a new creation myth: a singing loom, a breathing thread, a world woven with ancestral memory. This story evokes the transition between silence and vibration, where every sound is a symbol, an echo of the earth, a gesture of resistance. The Tzotzopaztli—a vital component of the backstrap loom—becomes an ancient voice that guides Xunka in the creation of a meta-thread: a living fiber that contains the biocultural history of her people. The voices of grandmothers, prayers, rivers, birdsong, and the rustling of leaves…