By Dr. Colin Russo Emerging issues may make huge changes to food futures, but people really aren’t aware of their presence. The consequence of the issue may seem a long way off in the future yet may be building in the background with no statistics pervasive in the popular media. Statistics about demand for food are always being monitored, by authorities interested in the consumer price index i.e. when the price of food changes it has a small impact on inflation, but this is only news for some people. Statistics are also monitored closely by food suppliers (growers, sellers, packaging…
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Dr. Sohail Inayatullah and Dr. Levi Obijiofor Beyond the Nation as Sovereign In the Olympics of the 20th and 21st century, only winning matters. Winning boosts a nation’s image, turns winners into instant millionaires, and unifies internal enemies. More than that, it re-inscribes the nation as the natural and only form of government. Can we imagine an Olympics with different sorts of ‘territoriality’, perhaps a line-up of ethnicities, individuals, geographical and virtual communities, transnational corporations, and even civilisations? Can we imagine a postmodern Olympics focused on difference? Can we imagine a situation where there is excellence and challenge but not…
by Erica Bol Schools and universities’ mission statements talk about preparing students for the future. But are we preparing students for the future if our curricula are only focused on the past? In this rapid changing world, not even distant past is very informative of the future. In order to prepare our students, we should teach them how to anticipate, embrace and shape the future; we should teach them futures thinking. Futures thinking is an essential skill that is critical to deal with a world full of changes. It will help students realize that they are capable of proactively creating…
Dr. Sohail Inayatullah and Dr. Levi Obijiofor We love watching the Olympics, and are inspired by athletic and organizational excellence. However, the Olympics are not a neutral venue. Every medal is based on a stream of money, power, genes and deep culture. In this 2-part essay [1] we unpack the political-economy of the Olympics. Becoming an Olympic superstar So, you want to be an Olympic Superstar. How should you plan your career, to best ensure success? Three factors stand out in deciding which teams get Olympic medals. First is the size of the population. The more people, the larger pool…
one step at a time like this are a collective of performance artists who specialize in transforming the “audience” into the performer, through a unique approach to contemporary arts practice. Bridgette Engler and I were approach by one step about a year ago, to ostensibly “help them” with a futures project. Bridgette and I designed a creative and interactive process of two half-day workshops that would run them through a foresight process to envision the futures of contemporary arts practice – 50-100 years from now. However in what might be described as “inversion” or “entrapment”, we the futurists soon found…
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).…
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…