Jun Woo Kwon1,*
1Department of Physical Education, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Our World of Futures Studies as a Mosaic: Part 1, edited by Tero Villman, Sirkka Heinonen, and Laura Pouru-Mikkola, is not best understood as a conventional handbook (Villman et al., 2024). It is also not quite a global survey. Its sharper contribution is field-reflexive: the book asks how futures studies might describe itself when it is no longer narrated from a single centre. The metaphor of the mosaic is therefore not just a framing device. It is the central question the volume leaves with the reader. Can a mosaic become a method for futures studies?
The editors are careful about the scope of the project. They do not claim to offer an all-encompassing account of futures studies and foresight across the world. Instead, the book begins assembling pieces from different national, regional, and transnational contexts. The chapters range from European cases such as Finland, Denmark, Germany, France, and Italy to discussions of Morocco, African governance scenarios, Latin American long-term thinking, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, and global networks such as the Millennium Project and the UNESCO Global Futures Literacy Network. It shows that futures studies has not developed as one coherent discipline expanding outward. It has been made through different institutions, languages, policy cultures, intellectual traditions, and practical needs.
This is where the originality of the volume lies. It does not simply add more regional cases to an already settled futures studies canon. It makes that canon look less settled in the first place. Read alongside Slaughter’s account of the knowledge base of futures studies as an evolving process, the book contributes by treating the field as something still being assembled, rather than as a completed body of concepts and methods (Slaughter, 1996). Some chapters foreground institutional continuity. The Finnish case, for example, presents futures studies through academic programs, parliamentary foresight, civil-society organizations, and national foresight structures. Other chapters show more fragile or partial forms of visibility. These contrasts matter because they prevent the reader from assuming that the maturity of the field must always take the same form.
The mosaic metaphor also invites a methodological reading, though the book itself does not fully develop one. Inayatullah’s causal layered analysis argues that futures work should not stop at surface-level trends, but should move through deeper social causes, worldviews, myths, and metaphors (Inayatullah, 1998). Mosaic does not apply causal layered analysis, and it would be a mistake to force the book into that framework. Still, the comparison is useful. Many chapters show that futures studies is shaped not only by methods, but by background assumptions about expertise, governance, participation, progress, uncertainty, and agency. The French tradition of la prospective, the Finnish model of anticipatory governance, African governance scenarios, and Latin American approaches to long-term thinking are not simply different examples of the same thing. They show different ways in which futures knowledge becomes legitimate.
The chapters on global networks deepen this point. The Millennium Project and the UNESCO Global Futures Literacy Network shift the book away from a simple country-by-country structure. They show futures studies as a set of travelling practices, distributed communities, and shared capacities. Miller’s framing of futures literacy as a capability for understanding and diversifying how people use the future is especially relevant here (Miller, 2018). From this perspective, the book’s value is not only that it shows where futures studies happens. It also shows how anticipation is cultivated through institutions, networks, and learning processes.
The book is most convincing when it lets differences remain visible. It does not reduce futures studies to forecasting, scenario planning, technology foresight, policy anticipation, or futures literacy. It lets these practices sit beside one another. For a field still shaped by familiar methods and centres, this matters. In conditions that Sardar describes as marked by complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty, such plurality is not a decorative addition to futures work; it is part of the environment in which futures work now has to operate (Sardar, 2010). A single genealogy of the field would be too neat.
At the same time, this strength points to the book’s main limitation. A mosaic can display plurality without fully explaining the relations among its pieces. At several moments, the reader is left wanting a sharper comparative framework. Why do some futures traditions become globally visible while others remain local or peripheral? What is lost when terms such as foresight, futures studies, la prospective, prognostics, and futures literacy are translated into one another? Which institutional models travel easily, and which depend on very specific political cultures? The volume opens these questions, but it does not always follow them far enough.
This matters because the mosaic metaphor has a double edge. It can help decentre futures studies, but it can also make difference look harmonious too quickly. Narrative foresight reminds us that the stories through which futures are told shape what becomes thinkable and actionable (Milojević & Inayatullah, 2015). The mosaic is one such story. It is generous and inclusive, but it may also soften tensions around power, translation, and uneven recognition. For this reason, it would be too strong to call the volume a fully decolonial intervention. It does, however, open space for a more decentered conversation about the field, especially by including regions, terms, and traditions that are often treated as secondary to better-known Euro-American futures literature.
Overall, Our World of Futures Studies as a Mosaic: Part 1 is most useful when it makes futures studies appear less like a settled discipline and more like a plural, unfinished field of practice. Its value is not completeness. Its contribution is to ask how futures studies might learn from plurality without turning that plurality into a single model. A future step would be to make the mosaic more explicitly comparative: not only showing the pieces, but examining the gaps, borders, translations, and asymmetries between them. That is where the mosaic may begin to work as a method.
AI Disclosure Statement
The author used AI-assisted tools solely for grammar and language refinement. The author wrote the original draft, conducted the review and editing, and takes full responsibility for the manuscript.
References
Inayatullah, S. (1998). Causal layered analysis: Poststructuralism as method. Futures, 30(8), 815–829. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-3287(98)00086-x
Miller, R. (Ed.). (2018). Transforming the future: Anticipation in the 21st century. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351048002
Milojević, I., & Inayatullah, S. (2015). Narrative foresight. Futures, 73, 151–162. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2015.08.007
Sardar, Z. (2010). Welcome to postnormal times. Futures, 42(5), 435–444. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2009.11.028
Slaughter, R. A. (1996). The knowledge base of futures studies as an evolving process. Futures, 28(9), 799–812. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0016-3287(96)00043-2
Villman, T., Heinonen, S., & Pouru-Mikkola, L. (Eds.). (2024). Our world of futures studies as a mosaic: Part 1 (Futures Series 10). The Finnish Society for Futures Studies. https://www.tutuseura.fi/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Our-World-of-Futures-Studies-as-a-Mosaic-part-one.pdf