On 8 May 2018 in Washington D.C. Trump announced that the US withdraws from the JCPOA. It is also known as the Iran nuclear deal that was negotiated during Obama administration. The alternative futures that might emerge can be developed in four key scenarios and we can follow the direct and indirect paths of impacts using a tool known as the Future Wheel. The nuclear deal with Iran cancels altogether. When every other partner of the deal declares its withdrawal, the immediate consequences are the highest level of sanctions against Iran and in particular the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).…
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by Phillip Daffara Recently, I collaborated with two different schools to help their respective communities envision their preferred futures. This is an overview of some of the strategic foresight practices used with Jabiru Community College (JCC) and Montessori International College (MIC), particularly focussing on those moments in the process that integrate futures and human-centered design thinking. Client contexts Since 2009, I have co-created with MIC to complete various projects, firstly facilitating their new place vision (2011) for the master planning of their new campus, secondly the formulation of their Vision and Strategic Plan (2012); and mostly recently the renewal of…
Over the past several months the JFS Digital team has been having conversations for staring a JFS blog. The idea and initiative is still being worked through, and we expect to have the concept ready over the next month, by the end of July. In the meantime, we will be republishing content from selected sources from the JFS community. If you are interested in being a blog contributor, please contact us.
Journal of Futures Studies special symposium issue call for papers and mixed media We see the need to deepen, as Kodwo Eshun has phrased it in his article Further Considerations on Afrofuturism (2003), our Afrofutures “tool kit developed for and by Afrodiasporic intellectuals” with the imperative “to code, adopt, adapt, translate, misread, rework, and revise” visions of the black imagination and aspiration alongside a critical appraisal of the utopic, technologically sophisticated city state and space of Wakanda, the mythical black nation untouched by colonization in the film The Black Panther. As a historic, record setting film in terms of its…
The Future of Marriage is a conceptualization of American marriage in the year 2036 from a U.S. West-coast perspective. The project was developed over the course of five months in 2016 by four graduate students in the MBA Design Strategy program at the California College of the Arts, in a course run by Dr. Jake Dunagan. Using acquired concepts and methods from Strategic Foresight to build future scenarios, The Future of Marriage coalesces these scenarios into a film that explores marriage in the year 2036. How does one define marriage? What are the important characteristics that influence marriage? How does…
This special issue on the futures of Africa seeks to provide critical thinking about the futures of Africa that can support a range of new development strategies. It aims to explore key drivers of transformation, and the futures these point towards. And it aims to refresh analysis and change mindsets by providing a deeper understanding that there are new and different ways to think about the futures of Africa. Too often the popular image of the futures of Africa is subject to binary and reactive clichés. When there is a commodity crash the pundits resort to doom images – the…
Welcome to the JFS Virtual Symposium landing page. Here you’ll find basic information on the virtual symposium. This symposium was born in an effort to draw upon the strengths of futures studies and related perspectives perspectives: a critical assessment of images of the future, an understanding of macro-history and the longue durée (long term social change processes), the role of worldviews and narratives. In short the challenge for authors and interviewees was twofold: on the one hand explain the Trump phenomenon from a long term historical perspective, revealing deeper patterns and processes, and on the other hand begin to articulate…
1. We Are All Mad Here It is a strange new world in which we find ourselves, where down is up and what was outrageous is now merely normal. While bookshops sell out of George Orwell’s 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World a close second, perhaps the best advice might be found in reaching for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” Society was different then. The election of Trump in spite or because of his racism, his treatment towards women, his bullying and his poor…
Abstract Using causal layered analysis (CLA), a critical futures methodology, this paper maps and analyses a number of competing discourses relating to accountability to community within the scholarly literature. The focus is on the multiple perspectives expressed by scholars as viewed through the lens of corporate-community accountability. The aims are to challenge current dominant views, introduce a range of other views, and reflect on implications. Particular attention is on accountability issues where the impact on community is currently most obvious. This is business concerned with extracting raw materials from the earth. The scholarly literature is ordered along a continuum according…
Abstract Pathways toward ‘overshoot and collapse’ futures are not always or exclusively determined by international trends, national governments, wars and large-scale events. While these gain considerable attention their overall impact is arguably no greater than the constant ‘drip, drip, drip’ of conventional decision-making around more mundane activities that fall under familiar headings like ‘business strategy’, ‘economic growth’ and ‘development’. While cities have master plans and strategic goals most of them evolve within, and are expressed through, a continuous series of commercially inspired projects founded on narrow short-term economic assumptions. They emerge from a typically up-beat, entrepreneurial (profit-oriented) and finance-based worldview…