Futures Studies, Anticipation, and Futures Literacies: An Invitation to Co-create an Open Living Framework

Abstract

Invitations are usually offered with a desire to attract a specific audience. You want the invitees to come to your party. This invitation is no different, we want readers of this article to join us and many others who are already part of what we call the Global Futures Literacy Network, but not for a one-shot festive moment. Our hope is that what we are offering, a set of definitions, frameworks, and works in progress, will attract engagement in, as the title puts it, the “co-creation of an open living framework”. The conclusion to this text offers what we believe are a few compelling reasons to make the investments, compromises, and affiliations that such a joined-up endeavour requires. But here, at the outset, it is essential for us to make sure it is clear that this invitation is not about joining a fixed, pre-defined platform, itinerary, or agenda.

Full text

Author’s pre-publication version – submitted to Futures (v16, July 2022)
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Draft: July 13, 2022.
Futures Studies, Anticipation, and Futures Literacies: An
Invitation
to Co-
create an Open Living Framework
Riel Miller a* (ORCID 0000-0001-6329-5983)
Kwamou Eva Feukeu b (ORCID 0000-0003-3697-0132)
Nicolas Balcom Raleighc (ORCID 0000-0003-3689-0511)
a. Senior Fellow: Ecole des Ponts Business School; University of New Brunswick;
University of Stavanger
b. Africa Lead/Research Associate at Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private
International Law, Germany, and PhD candidate, Lancaster Law School, Lancaster
University, United Kingdom. k.feukeu@lancaster.ac.uk
c. Project Researcher and PhD Candidate, Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku School
of Economics, University of Turku, Finland. nabara@utu.fi
*Corresponding Author, riel.miller@gmail.com, address: Ecole des Ponts Business School, 6
place du Colonel Bourgoin, 75012, Paris, France

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“Society itself can be meaningfully understood as the aggregation of the repetitive and
patterned expectations and images of the future that shape action and that, through action,
produce social formations. Society is re-created each day as people act, calling on both their
memories and anticipations. Arguably, the futurist’s job is in part to make this process more
conscious.”
(W. Bell & Olick, 1989)
Invitations are usually offered with a desire to attract a specific audience. You want the invitees
to come to your party. This
invitation
is no different, we want readers of this article to join us
and many others who are already part of what we call the Global Futures Literacy Network, but
not for a one-shot festive moment. Our hope is that what we are offering, a set of definitions,
frameworks, and works in progress, will attract engagement in, as the title puts it, the “co-
creation of an open living framework”. The conclusion to this text offers what we believe are a
few compelling reasons to make the investments, compromises, and affiliations that such a
joined-up endeavour requires. But here, at the outset, it is essential for us to make sure it is
clear that this invitation is not about joining a fixed, pre-defined platform, itinerary, or agenda.
We aspire to walk the talk of different conceptions of knowing the world around us, with as
much openness to other identities, forged of different notions of agency and different avenues to
perception and choice. This is only doable through on-going interaction. Hence this invitation is
more a call to be part of cultivating a garden, although we also hope that there will be plenty of
opportunities to metaphorically put on some music and dance (like more than 8,000 people did
at the UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit held in December 2020).
We realise that many eminent thinkers from within and outside futures studies have already
offered similar invitations
1
and we have not only tried hard to learn from them but also
attempted to appreciate the diversity and differences that are expressed by their distinct
histories, needs, and expectations. Having noted these premises, choices still need to be made,
points of view selected, and responsibility taken. Given the space and time constraints of this
essay we want to focus this ‘invitation’ on a fairly narrow part of a broader effort to position the
field of Futures Studies on the theoretical foundations of anticipatory systems and processes
2
.
Specifically, we want to focus on two speculative propositions:
The first proposition is that the current conjuncture (climate extinction, pandemic, war,
accumulation of knowledge, etc.) is opening up an opportunity to create a community of
interest and practice around a shared set of always tentative but nevertheless
operational parameters that define a common terrain for the academic field of Futures
Studies. This statement is made while aware of North/South asymmetries in both the
expression and consequences of this realisation (Andreotti & al., 2019). Indeed, we
believe that both the theory and practice of Futures Studies (FS), even within the limited
boundaries we are proposing, offers an invitation that can contribute to appreciative
negotiation of shared meanings that are sourced from the diversity of human and non-
human circumstances that distinguish different places and communities (see Nandy,
1996, see critiques of Sardar’s Post-Normal Times framework addressed in Sardar,
1
There have been other such invitations, such as
Why Futures Studies
by Eleonora B. Mansini 1993, and
terrain describing efforts, such as the WSFS attempt to produce a core curriculum for Futures Studies
(see, e.g., Bishop, 2016). These efforts attempt to give definition to the field, which in turn circumscribes it
and invites people to engage with it while excluding those who do not identify with the definition.
2
The current article is an attempt to build on the proposition that the ‘discipline of anticipation’ can serve
as a ‘big tent’ theoretical foundation for the diversity of reasons and methods human use to imagine the
future. The Futures Literacy Framework presented in Chapter 1 of Transforming the Future (Miller, 2018)
provides elements of this ‘work-in-progress’ proposal in more detail.

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2015). By focusing on capability rather than futures tools, we limit the risk of imposing a
particular conception of futures onto participants of futures processes.
The second proposition follows-on from the first one by further speculating that
building up the academic field of Futures Studies could have potential knock-on
implications for the more general use-of-the-future throughout society. In this scenario
Futures Studies, within the confines of the broadly defined ‘academy’, focuses on the
twin tasks of developing and applying the theory and practice of anticipation. As a
result, the generic competency of ‘futures literacy’, and all of its diverse expressions as
‘literacies’ that reflect substantive differences in why, how and in what context people
deploy anticipatory systems and processes, is imagined to become broader and deeper
worldwide.
Our contention is that efforts to understand the breadth and depth of conscious human
anticipatory systems and processes offers a powerful and inclusive framework for shared
research, learning and community engagement. We propose that a shared assumption, that
anticipatory systems and processes do exist and can be understood, opens up an avenue for
Futures Studies to play g a stronger and more sustainable role in both the academic world and
contribute to the diffusion of a capability that touches on every aspect of life.
Our two speculative propositions are bounded, in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most
important constraint for the present article is the decision to embed the discussion within
today’s dominant academic and analytical modalities. By imposing such limits we are clearly not
trying to claim a totalizing or exhaustive point-of-view on the subject of human anticipation. On
the contrary the point is to be clear that we are discussing a circumscribed terrain, one that is
defined in large part by existing – mainly Western – conventions and power-structures,
specifically those of the broadly defined global academic research systems, networks and
communities (Conway, 2022; cf., e.g., Facer & Sriprakash, 2021; Son, 2015). Limiting the ‘party’
to this particular dance floor is not meant to deny or impede partying to other music in other
contexts. In fact, there is a hope that there might be positive spill-overs, insights and inspiration
arising out of a more robust academic presence for Futures Studies for those deploying other
reasons and methods for imagining the future.
We also suspect that by providing a definition of Futures Studies not limited to foresight,
planning, and forecasting that have found their historical
raison d’être
and foundations in
Western history, the future could speak to other histories and geographies from both inside and
out. There is a specific reason why Futures Studies remains particularly white and male (Sardar,
1993).
Part of it lies in a contestable relationship to the future that is highly structured by the
desire to control or ‘colonise’ tomorrow found in many Western-style technocratic
processes of business and governance. Another reason is directly related to issues of
power that remain unresolved and worse, replicated, in the field by its methods and
parameters. Hence ensconced at the pinnacles of today’s hierarchical power structures.
Ignoring contemporary scientific debates on the inherent lack of objectivity of any
methods, the role of ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 2016) and the predominance of
the author’s worldview in one’s ability to perceive, analyze and document the world
(e.g. Wiredu, 1996; Tlotsonova & Mignolo, 2012), FS has yet to reflexively acknowledge
conceptual and methodological frameworks whose intent or effect does not blindly
reproduce current forms of domination. Our hope in proposing an anticipatory systems
and processes foundation for Futures Studies is to get beyond a zero-sum-game, where
investments and explorations by existing academic communities must impede or
undermine the on-going efforts to diversify the expression, invention and power of

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other reasons and ways of knowing. Such a diversification provides a better way of
attempting to ‘understand’ constantly changing realities, and therefore better science.
An aspirational motivation for this article is to propose that efforts to develop Futures Studies by
interrogating its theoretical foundations could lead the field to greater mainstream credibility
and availability in education systems. Such efforts would enable the field to make contributions
to a wider understanding of human anticipatory systems and processes and capabilities, beyond
the boundaries of the currently dominant uses-of-the-future.
These efforts have so far been rebuked by the unwillingness or lack of awareness that futures
capabilities (futures literacy) cover a wider and paradigmatically distinctive range of anticipatory
systems and processes. For us, futures literacy encompasses more than knowledge of a specific
set of tools for describing imaginary futures (such as Delphi, horizon scanning, scenarios, etc.)
that have been created and applied in order to use-the-future to influence the future. We thus
acknowledge that these methods are geographically and contextually rooted and may not make
sense everywhere and with anyone, and even become outdated in the contexts where they have
emerged. Placing Futures Studies on an anticipatory systems and processes foundation, one that
includes other reasons and ways of using-the-future, the human capacity to imagine, is one
avenue towards enabling the field to acknowledge and give meaning to other reasons and
methods for trying to know (or not-know) the future.
We observe that today’s default ways of developing and using the futures we imagine is
contributing to humanity’s crimes against both itself (e.g., war, racism, femicide, enslavement)
and the rest of living nature (e.g., extractivist economic regimes: communist, capitalist, or
other). This observation serves as another important source of motivation for inviting an
‘anticipation turn’ in Futures Studies that enables a diversification of the reasons and methods
for using-the-future beyond our field’s status quo, while recontextualizing the field’s existing
methods and tools. We are motivated by the prospect, speculative as it may be, that by
prioritizing and emphasizing the study and exploration of existing and yet-to-be invented forms
of human (and non-human) anticipation, the field of Futures Studies might become deeper and
broader, more collaborative, and diverse, achieving greater societal relevance through a form of
mainstreaming, while also contributing to important advances in scientific thinking.
One point worth underscoring is that the diversification we believe in, facilitated by building an
extensive interest in why and how people can use-the-future, is likely to alter the allocation of
attention and practice in the field. Right now, Futures Studies is largely focused on only one sub-
set of all the billions of imagined futures humans are generating every minute of every day. For
the most part those engaged in Futures Studies are preoccupied by the images of the future that
are coveted by the powerful (e.g., geopolitical configurations, advanced computing, megatrends
affecting business or governance, new imaginaries) or derived from mass media/popular-
culture imagining (e.g., the computing-related buzzwords of the month, latest gadgets,
privatisation of space exploration, together with the hubristic conqueror reflex). The immense
number of other images of the future – produced for many reasons and with many methods – do
not even enter into consideration.
Yoked to the logic and functionality of today’s dominant structures and processes for exercising
what is believed to be the power to make change happen means that Futures Studies is
unnecessarily confined. Futures Studies’ research and application, theory and practice, are
constrained to ways of knowing, tools and images that are fit and legible only for the purposes
of planning. There is no denying that planning is crucial for humans in a multiplicity of ways.
However, the exclusion of other purposes for imagining the future obscures the significance and
power of other kinds of imaginary futures for so many aspects of life – not least the ability to
perceive and comprehend novelty produced by the inherent uncertainty of the complex creative
universe in which our planet and us humans exist.

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Discerning and comprehending the attributes of anticipation on the basis of different reasons
for imagining the future, in other words different kinds of futures (ontologically distinct)
contributes decisively to the inclusion within Futures Studies of a much wider range of
anticipatory systems and processes than those harnessed exclusively for the purposes of
command and control, planning and decision-making. Crucially, enlarging the relevance of
imagined futures beyond a narrow focus on making bets opens a vast terrain that can be traced
back to the primordial role of anticipatory systems and processes in perception. Studying the
dynamics connecting imagined futures and perception – the seeing that precedes doing – is one
of the crucial pathways towards gaining a better understanding of the wide variety of reasons
and methods for imagining the future. Thus, once again, it is by adopting the ‘discipline of
anticipation’ that Futures Studies makes a turn towards a theory and practice that enlarges who
feels welcome to launch inquiries into a broader range of topics.
In closing this section, we want to reiterate the crucial premise that our goal is to invigorate the
testing and reformulation of humanity’s conscious awareness and use of anticipatory systems
and processes to realise a more inclusive point of departure for Futures Studies. One that is not
only more ‘scientific’ (enabling better understanding) but also a viable avenue for reassessing
and reconstructing human agency in ways that are more compatible with a universe that is in a
complex (creative, inherently unknowable in advance) state.
The links between Futures Studies, Anticipation, and Futures Literacy
If we take as our starting point that Futures Studies is about exploring and untangling the
diversity of anticipatory systems and processes that serve conscious human perception and
choice, then the main task of Futures Studies is to explore the reasons and methods humans use
to invent, reproduce, critique, and forget images of the future. Images that play a central role in
generating and reproducing the entanglements of experience, ideas, meanings, and assumptions
that constitute the performance of life. Put slightly differently, Futures Studies as a research
domain encompasses not only the constantly emerging images of the future, without which
consciousness, perception and action would be impossible, but also the immensely diverse
sources and uses of these imagined futures.
On the basis of this way of defining Futures Studies we can then define ‘futures literacies’ as the
capabilities associated with conscious awareness of the attributes and roles of the diverse
anticipatory systems and processes (ASP) that are both within us and all around us. Futures
Studies cultivates ‘futures literacies’ by fostering a greater understanding of conscious human
anticipatory systems and processes. Efforts within the field of Futures Studies and the
associated competencies that make up the multi-dimensional elements of ‘futures literacies’
obviously require researchers to set out the ontological and epistemological parameters – in
theory and in practice – that set both the outer boundaries of the field and the internal
categorical divisions of the phenomena FS seeks to explain and deploy.
This brings us to one starting point for
co-creating a living framework
, the categorization
offered in
Transforming the Future
(Miller, 2018). The point of the Futures Literacy Framework
described in detail in Chapter 1 of Transforming the Future was to provide one way of
distinguishing different anticipatory systems and processes. The framework sets up both
ontological and epistemological criteria for sorting different anticipatory systems and processes
into different categories (Miller, 2018). The framework is intended as a contribution to the
project of expanding Futures Studies to encompass a wider set of anticipatory systems and
processes. Much like the ‘table of elements’ provides criteria that help to describe phenomena
and guide both the search for and invention of previously invisible or unimaginable ones.

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Of course, there are many different kinds of maps and frameworks, as well as many different
entry points into building such scaffoldings, that can contribute to everyone, not just
researchers and students, interested in living as fully as they can/want in this particular
universe. We hope we are clear, we are not making the case for there being only one map or
framework, nor for one ‘correct’ epistemic path or ‘objective’ key for such maps. The transition
we are observing, feeling, championing, and aspiring for is one in which Futures Studies is open
and dynamic. Our witness and preferences do not rest on any single factor, such as a
breakthrough insight, necessity, accident, disease, hate crime, or manifest reason, that we are
arguing accounts for the emergence of particular parametrizations and debates in a field,
specific keys – ontological categories and epistemic logics – at any one particular point in time.
But things do happen.
Experiments, mostly unrelated to any specific intentional human origin, abound – reality,
thrumming with repetition and difference, emerges. And low and behold, old formulations find
new resonance, fundamentally unknowable in advance novel ideas or mash-ups of ideas pop
into existence, and new imperatives, constraints and invitations arise that do, or do not, set out
conditions such that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’. Right now, we the authors of this
piece, are encountering and initiating experiments, along with colleagues from around the
world, that can be interpreted as signalling that the conditions are ripe for a significant
mutation of Futures Studies. Some might call it a turning or tipping point, or maybe a milestone
that assists with the recognition and the formation of durable memories of the already fading
differences between before and after. In any case, our intuition is that we are experiencing such
a moment. Which is why we are doing our best to sense and make-sense of it, as well as share
our efforts (e.g., through essays like this one) to understand what is happening.
What is Happening?
A historical and contextual analysis of the anticipatory activities initiated and legitimated by
those in power over the last 70 years shows that Futures Studies, as explained persuasively by
Jenny Andersson in her recent intellectual history
The Future of the World
(Andersson, 2018),
has mostly been preoccupied by the practical challenges of planning (Andersson, 2012;
Andersson, 2018: 192). Constrained to the goal of planning the future (positive desired and
negative to be avoided) it is not surprising that futures studies has been largely about figuring
out how to produce obtainable goals and probabilistic
3
images of the future and associated
stepping-stones or means for reaching targets. As a result, most of the research and applied
futures work in Futures Studies has focused on one ontological category of futures (the future
imagined for the purposes of planning) and one set of epistemological approaches – mostly
within the broad reaches of causal determinism, along with what that implies for human
identity in our roles as agents/actors.
The process of transferring this approach to time and space from the colonizing (imperialist)
powers to the rest of the world has been underway for some four centuries. A recent and rather
striking example is the way in which sub-Saharan communities in Africa, following the
economic crises of the 1980s (Adesida & Oteh, 2004),were told that if they wanted to continue
to receive credit and investments from the North planning capabilities would need to be
significantly enhanced. With hindsight, the paternalistic and arm-twisting nature of such
initiatives is evident – better planning will save African nations from corrupt bureaucratic daily
practices (Olivier de Sardan, 2014), colonised currencies (Nubukpo et al., 2016) or inadequate
formal structures for informal social and economic transactions. Both what is important in the
world, the aspects of daily life we pay attention to, and the choices we make on the basis of such
3
Probability is always intersubjectively expressed and given meaning, for example as risk estimates of one
kind or another, meanwhile the conditions producing probabilities themselves change over time (cf.
(North, 2005)).

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perceptions, decision-making, were forced to depend on only one way of imagining the future –
a convergence to industrialism, planning and ‘growth’.
There can be little doubt that the anticipatory activities recognized and practiced by
technocratic bureaucracies overwhelmingly privilege the use of imaginary futures for planning-
related purposes (and for good reason, planning is the primary modus operandi of
bureaucracies). Consequently, it is not surprising that Futures Studies focuses mainly on tools
that incorporate imagined futures that will be useful for the purposes of planning – and let’s be
frank – conquest (Feukeu, forthcoming: on coloniality as a closed anticipatory system; Miller,
forthcoming). The list of techniques, currently residing under the broad label of ‘strategy’, is
quite long, ranging from econometric forecasting and actuarial risk analysis to various tools for
imagining multiple futures and corresponding targets such as the ‘futures cone’, ‘four
quadrants’, ‘Delphi’, ‘three horizons’, ‘morphological analysis’, etc.
4
Over the last 60 years or so, many programs and hot-spots for futures studies and foresight
have sprung up at universities (see, e.g., Ramos 2005; World Futures Studies Federation 2006),
in civil society, in companies and in government. Interest in undertaking structured approaches
to imagining the future has been spurred by events, like the oil shock (e.g. Shell Scenarios, see,
e.g. Andersson 2020; and Global Business Network, see, e.g. Schwartz 1996), popular
quantitative scenarios like the ‘limits to growth’ report to Club of Rome (Meadows et al., 1974),
or ‘future shock’ (Toffler, 1984), the advent of an arbitrary but provocative date – like the year
2000 (Bellamy, 1888; e.g., Bell et al., 1997), and now a pandemic shock sparked by Covid-19.
Along the way, motivations emanating from competing in the Cold War set all forms of military
and statecraft foresight in motion (e.g., the book
On Thermonuclear War
, Kahn, 1960). There
have also been charismatic academic and consultancy leaders who have been successful in
developing and diffusing specific approaches, methods, and tools for imagining the future and
applying these images to the task of ‘improving profits’, ‘making a difference’, ‘creating a better
future’, or ‘managing risk’– in other words making bets, planning.
Still, what is striking – and might be taken as a symptom of the field's immaturity or
misspecification or maybe both – is that despite the critical role of images of the future in all
planning processes and the impressive epistemological inventiveness (new tools), Futures
Studies as a distinctive, specialised field for research and learning, the provider of parameters
for “science”, that enhance both horizontal (cross-specialisation) and vertical (specialised)
shared efforts, has not achieved a significant presence in academic institutions around the
world. Despite the proliferation of different methods for generating images, models and stories
of the future for use in planning and the obvious centrality of imagined futures for all the social
sciences, particularly policy advice, Futures Studies is in no way as well developed or
recognized as other academic fields such as economics, statistics, policy studies, etc. Very few
universities offer advanced degrees in Futures Studies, even fewer bachelor’s level degrees.
Those that do have Futures Studies courses or programs run them inside already recognized
faculties such as business schools (e.g., Finland Futures Research Centre or Oxford Scenarios
Programme) or political science departments (e.g., Hawaii Futures). There is also a panoply of
tool-specific foresight training programs aimed at enhancing the strategic planning capabilities
of corporate executives and/or public sector policy makers (e.g. Institute for the Future or the
Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies). The bottom line is that in practice Futures Studies
largely consists of a set of evidence-driven methods (past data) and extrapolative tools that are
highly functional for planning. An ancillary factor, given the dominance of technique and
personality in the larger field, is that competition, or perhaps more accurately a form of self-
interested autarky prevails, with each purveyor of a particular solution to the problem of
introducing imagined futures into planning processes doing their best to perfect their tool and
sell its utility to the gigantic market that is created by the ubiquity of efforts to win the future.
4
See toolbox collections such as (Hines, 2007) and the catalog by (The Millennium Project, 2009).

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Now the context appears to be changing. We are some 75 years after events like D-day, the
Manhattan project, operations research, and Soviet five-year plans that provided persuasive
narratives that underpinned the discourses and confidence of predictive planning (not to
mention earlier marvels like urban planning in the 19th Century, building pyramids, the Great
Wall, the Coliseum, etc.). We are also experiencing a set of phenomena that may implicitly or
explicitly point to the inadequacy of planning, like climate change and the melt down of
administrative command-control systems, as the desire and capacity for heterogeneity rather
than scale standardization of industrialization comes to the fore.
Furthermore, advances in understanding complexity as a constant state that enables
‘ontological expansion’ (Tuomi, 2012) or Bergsonian novelty (Bergson, 1934) unknowable in
advance, even if we had perfect models and perfect data, has combined with the realisation that
freedom is not a static condition but co-produced through dynamic and contextually situated
capabilities (Estes, 2019; Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 1999). All of which sets out conditions for a
transition in Futures Studies from the fragmentation and epistemic narrowness associated with
a preoccupation with methods and tools for planning towards a more encompassing starting
point that originates with the study of universally occurring, and highly diverse, anticipatory
systems and processes (Rosen, 1999, at least for living organisms, 2012 [1985])
5
.
The turn or pivot here is not just about expanding beyond the constraints of purpose and
causal/deterministic epistemology set by the dominant forms of 20th century planning, it is
about significantly enlarging what Futures Studies is trying to understand. In this expansion, the
primary subject of study for Futures Studies, as already explained above, becomes the sources,
origins, co-productions and uses of imagined futures and what are the consequences. As a result
of such diversification, Futures Studies becomes much less preoccupied, in relative terms, with
images of what might happen next (scenarios), and devotes more attention to understanding
the nature and functioning of the diversity of anticipatory systems and processes that generate
and mobilize such futures. In other words, this definition of the research subject of ‘futures’
changes the parameters which shape the theories and knowledge developed and used by the
field’s scholars and practitioners.
To be clear, this turn does not mean that planning, scenarios, or any of the ‘betting’ methods and
tools that dominate current approaches to using-the-future, are no longer relevant parts of
Futures Studies. Rather the point is to locate these aspects of futures thinking within a larger
terrain that includes a much broader range of inquiry, activities aimed at understanding the
diversity of sources, modes of co-production, uses, and effects of imaginary futures. The logics of
the old tools gain new meanings, as they are coupled to the underlying anticipatory systems and
processes that make them work. Furthermore, the function of the old tools become explainable
as processes that enable certain forms and categories of futures to be generated and used,
helping to make clear their limitations, strengths and applications.
For instance, the distinct purposes or reasons for imagining the future can expand to include
images that are not conceived or produced with the goal of achieving a specific outcome. This
allows the formulation of images of the future to escape from the constraints of what can be
imagined on the basis of probable or desirable futures – using-the-future only to make bets.
Taking this path embraces another purpose, to liberate our perceptions of the present from the
constraints of both probabilistic and normative extrapolations of the past in order to sense and
make-sense of emergent novelty (Miller, 2006). Those phenomena that would be impossible to
name if we were prohibited from inventing new words and could only use yesterday’s
dictionary. Viewed in terms of this larger terrain, the ambition of Futures Studies is to
5
For early linkages of Rosen’s Anticipatory Systems to foresight and futures, see, (Louie, 2010)) and (Miller
and Poli, 2010)).

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understand all of the activities and sources that generate descriptions, feelings and applications
of images of the future, ranging from divination, improvisation for dialogue, and superstition
(e.g., Beerden, 2014; Keeling, 2019; Keats & Candy, 2020) to closed model predictions of risk;
and living utopias (Jameson, 2010; e.g., Levitas, 2013). Which also means that Futures Studies
must integrate knowledge from a wide range of other fields, e.g., from philosophy and physics to
biology and anthropology to literature and art, in order to explore past and present expressions
of the human ability to anticipate.
In this scenario, the repositioning of Futures Studies onto an anticipatory systems and
processes theoretical foundation enhances its legitimacy as a field of research, teaching and
practice – well beyond the narrow confines of being a tool for planning – contributing to it
becoming part of mainstream academic disciplines. At the same time ‘futures literacies’ as
socially constructed and collectively practiced competencies, might gain significant traction
because this capability clearly contributes in a pluri-disciplinary manner, engaging with the
manifest complexity (emergent novelty) of everyday life. Of course, there is no way to know if
the credibility and relevance imagined in this scenario will play a role in realising a broader
acceptance of Futures Studies within the power structures of the academy. We know full well
that neither the strength of a field’s theoretical foundations nor the coherence of its
‘disciplinarity’ guarantee that Futures Studies will become an established organizational unit
within the familiar constellation of institutions of knowledge reproduction, invention, diffusion,
and control.
We also want to be clear that imagining that Futures Studies becomes a standard departmental
unit in most universities in the world does not imply that we forgive or ignore the many short-
comings of existing university systems or the power structures/relationships that these
institutions perpetuate – not least of which is forms of ‘brain-drain’, unequal access, and
exclusion. The reason for adopting an extrapolatory business-as-usual image of the future, a
scenario in which most aspects of the past and present are held constant, is to highlight the
contrast between an imaginary picture where almost every university has a Futures Studies
faculty and today’s picture where there are little to none.
In this paper we are inviting speculation about some of the factors that might contribute to the
mainstreaming of Futures Studies within the global university system and the implications of
such a change. A fuller elaboration of such a scenario (or scenarios, if so desired) would need a
lot more descriptive detail and the spelling out of relevant anticipatory assumptions. For now,
we will not go off on that path, other than to note that the impact of mainstreaming Futures
Studies within the academy and its role in advancing ‘futures literacy’ do not need to be
confined to existing institutional carriers of research and teaching.
One of many potential societal versions of this scenario sees the flourishing of ‘futures literacy’,
as a capacity built upon a better understanding of anticipatory systems and processes,
benefiting from the efforts of researchers and students in the ‘hallowed halls’ of academe. In this
scenario the relationship between the academy and the world around it is mutually reinforcing.
We have imagined that the mainstreaming of Futures Studies in universities around the world
makes a positive contribution to the ‘democratisation of futures literacy.’ Going beyond the
minimum descriptive details of the scenario we present here is not difficult, there are many
imaginable implications for research agendas, communities of practice, and networks that
function in an extrapolated context that is similar to today’s knowledge/power
systems/processes.
One possible harbinger of such a future, perhaps a weak signal, is the rapidly growing ranks of
UNESCO Chairs in Futures Studies/Futures Literacy. Here is an emergent phenomenon that
thanks to a typical growth scenario (more Chairs, more proportional presence, more status,
etc.) suggests a reconsideration of the potential of the present. Of course, the UNESCO Chairs

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10
might end up just being a continuation of business as usual for Futures Studies, keeping it on the
technocratic white and male margins, an applied sub-speciality useful for strategy, planning and
reform efforts. Our ‘mainstreaming’ scenario imagines something different and naturally invites
reflection on current values and aspirations, lenses for seeing the potential of the present in a
different way
6
.
Why is ‘futures literacy’ important, particularly now?
Why might it be worth contemplating the ‘mainstreaming’ of Futures Studies as the pursuit of a
deeper and broader understanding of human anticipatory systems and processes? What is
distinctive about the current conjuncture, the confluence of circumstances, that makes it
possible and relevant to consider pursuing one of many strands, the academic one, for
integrating the future more effectively and efficiently into the ways humans perceive and act in
the world? Most human communities have gone for a long time without much of an
understanding or democratization of the origins and uses of the images of the future that shape
their hopes and fears – why change this now? Slightly reformulated, why is important in today’s
context to cultivate the speculative (imaginary) contribution that widely diffused and more
skilled ‘futures literacy’ might make to the ability of individuals and communities to appreciate
the world as being in a complex state, with its ambient experimentation and creativity, the
constant surprises of a universe in which novelty can exist? The answer, in a word, is
‘extinction’.
Today it is fairly evident that across a range of indicators our species is on a slow suicide
trajectory – all the while thinking we’re making good progress towards becoming immortal
conquerors of space and time. The latest waves of globalisation have in the same light been
conducive to the extinction, or more specifically, erasure of difference, starting with many
human imaginaries (Nandy, 1996). This invitation to take on the challenge of augmenting our
capacity to imagine the future is really not the place to plunge into scenarios that describe
radically different worlds – even if we admit to being partly motivated by the tendrils of the
impossible that inspire imaginaries full of changes in the conditions of change, whispers from
still unimaginable outcomes. For the purposes of this paper, we have been leaning on a set of
fairly self-evident propositions that stem from the contention that images of the future nourish
hope and fear, motivate action and define disappointment. This is how anticipation shapes both
what people notice and feel. This is why ‘futures literacy’ in a general sense, by enhancing the
human ability to understand the sources and consequences of imagined futures, changes what
people can sense/make-sense of and what they do. It empowers communities to construct their
own images of the future, to democratise one of the most powerful sources of the aspirations
and perceptions that enable human ingenuity and drive to invent and invest in ways of living
7
that they hope will include conditions for living meaningfully and ‘well’.
As for the question of why ‘futures literacy’ is of particular importance for humanity at this
point-in-time, the reasoning starts from the premise that it is better to attempt to understand
the world than not, so cultivating the capabilities needed to better understand the world is a
worthy cause (as thinkers like Lao Tzu pointed out long ago). The special noteworthy character
of the current context rests on the observation that at the level of our species as a whole, climate
6
Please note that this is not meant to be an example of what we call a reframing scenario or an exercise in
‘anticipation-for-emergence’. On the contrary, the scenario presented here is conventional ‘anticipation-
for-the-future’. For interested readers, we offer a reframe model: imagine what inquiring into anticipation
might look like in a future when academic degrees are not socio-economic signifiers but knowledge
creation and diffusion are much more present and transparent throughout society.
7
Please keep in mind that they might be imagining ways of living, often the case for indigenous
communities, that do not use-the-future to conquer or win tomorrow. So, there is no ‘better’ future. Indeed,
the future does not exist in the way that bureaucratic writing societies fantasize and does not need to.

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11
change, the pandemic shock, and the ubiquity of the horror we call war, can be traced, at least in
part, to the long-standing and dominant way of defining and living humanity’s relationship to
the future. Believing that we have the ability, even responsibility, to control the future means
treating the world as if it were a machine and we are the engineers who can design and fix it.
Convinced of our superiority we see the world and make choices in ways that are highly toxic,
cut off from appreciating the inter-dependencies, fragilities and mysteries all around us.
Many of us trained in the West have been and continue to be trapped in a colonizers attitude to
the future, rooted in the belief that we can and should impose today’s ideas on tomorrow. Too
often this is taken as licence to adopt deterministic logics and probabilistic images of the future
that powerfully limit what we can perceive and invent in the present. Our attention gravitates
around the imperatives arising from the futures we wish to impose (Sardar, 1993). This ‘tunnel
vision’ limits our ability to conceive of relationships between human agency and the world
beyond causality (Akomolafe, 2017), thereby restricting both our sense of personal expression
and the items that make it on to the menu of options from which we make our choices. Confined
to being an instrument for ‘designing’ tomorrow, we ‘outsource’ our imagination to experts,
geniuses, leaders. As a result, for many people their imagination atrophies, weakened by lack of
exercise and impoverished by a lack of care. With little awareness of the diversity of our
anticipatory systems and processes, compounded by the rather desperate hubris driving vain
efforts to colonise tomorrow, it is little wonder so many try so hard to either improve the future
by fixing the past (reform-adaptation) or, in the name of quelling anxiety by slaying uncertainty,
simply try to perpetuate the past (nostalgia). In both cases, the past was never questioned for
the story it was (see for e.g. Andreotti, 2019).
This is a tale of the apparent superiority of industrial society, ‘modernism’ and its ideologies.
Narrow ways of using-the-future that separate humans from the complex creative world around
us. The limited reasons and methods for imagining the future channel our attention and choices
to menus that only contain different degrees of bending the world to our ends. Spewing giga-
tons of carbon into the atmosphere or seeking standardization’s scale economies for the sake of
international supply-chains and mass tourism are just symptoms of the colonizers blind
willingness to embrace the view that the ends justify the means. And if things do go awry, it is
just a technical problem that can be fixed by upping humanity’s capacity to innovate. No wonder
there is currently such widespread pressure for people to not only innovate but improve the
performance of innovation systems. Not just innovate, but innovate faster (Sarr, 2016).
Relentless urging to find better and more timely solutions to our ‘grand challenges’. But this is
really just more of the same, with more exhortation and some new ‘how-to’ techniques,
accelerating the old and routinised modes of imagining futures, perceiving problems and
solutions, and bringing new products and services to market.
Highlighting the nature and role of the diverse capability called ‘futures literacy’ offers an
alternative, one way to transform the industrial era’s ways of seeing and acting in the world.
Improving the ability to use-the-future, to diversify why and how we imagine, seems to change
things at the level of the ‘operating system’ which is continuously recreating industrial era
patterns of blind exploitation, the seeing and acting that generate climate change and mono-
culture fragilities that exacerbate both vulnerability to and impact of inevitable surprises like
global pandemics.
‘Futures literacy’ is a critical contribution to cultivating open, locally driven capability-based
approaches to development (Nussbaum, 2011; Poli, 2015; Sen, 1999; see initiatives such as
ENDA GRAF Sahel in Senegal or Kabakoo in Mali). Developing ‘futures literacy’ enables young
and old to source and invent new stories together. To link the narratives of the past to the
images of the future that inspire hope and process our fears. Appreciating that past, present and
future are connected, but not like a road or highway, but rather like repeated stories and frames
used for understanding ourselves in our world.

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‘Futures literacy’ is a capability built upon the realisation that every community is woven from
an emergent, continuously reconfigured tapestry of images sparked by today’s events, fleeting
hopes and fears of tomorrow, and yesterday’s reinterpreted libations. By enhancing the capacity
to understand the sources, methods of production, and uses of different images of the future,
‘futures literacy’ fuels cross-generational learning and the ability to appreciate difference and
welcome novelty.
Thus, in the end, ‘futures literacy’ is about power. If we acknowledge that using the future is not
limited to corporate or public government planning and foresight, we are invited to appreciate
the every-day uses of the future by human communities, including Indigenous knowledge
systems. Anticipatory systems and processes are active everywhere and not the treasure hunt
of a few who define the rules and its applications (Polchar, Feukeu et al, 2020). Cultivating
futures literacies, in this scenario, has the potential to alter the functioning of humans in
relation to each other and their communities, much like other widespread capabilities such as
reading and writing, by empowering assemblages of people to better comprehend and engage
with complexity, emergence, and transformational potential in relation to making their own
choices concerning their own developments. Additionally, this capabilities-approach steers
futures studies and foresight away from imposing specific images of the future on
‘beneficiaries’, selling visions of tomorrow to ‘changemakers’, or requiring others to think time
and change using the exact same conceptualizations, frames, or tools for thinking.
For Futures Studies the implications are significant. On the one hand, the field would be better
positioned to help wrest some of the power held by today’s dominant purveyors of the images
of the future that direct our gaze, what we look at and see, and the choices we make, the
calculations, intuitions, and aspirations behind our bets. On the other hand, by cultivating
futures literacies and the diversification of the reasons and methods used to imagine the future,
the field would help to not only expand the relevant subject matter, but also the awareness and
confidence of agents and initiators able to break out of solely linear conceptions of time and
causality. As a result it becomes easier to understand the dynamic relationships that are
constantly changing our perceptions of the past, the present, and the future. By cultivating a
broader and more diverse range of anticipatory skills, Futures Studies can contribute to
changing the underlying conditions that do, or do not, enable people to voice and negotiate
individual and collective images of hope and fear, to sense and make-sense of novelty, to live
complexity.
Widespread efforts by a far-flung Global Futures Literacy Network and diverse coincident and
confluent communities are directly and indirectly exploring and diffusing the many distinct
attributes of living ‘futures literacies’. Explicit, transparent, and sharable evidence is gradually
accumulating. We are gaining a better understanding of the contours and uses of our conscious
anticipatory systems and processes. People from around the world are undertaking learning
voyages that cultivate their ‘futures literacy’, allowing them to become aware of aspects of their
imagination and of the world around them that invite the following kinds of questions:
Why am I imagining this future, at this moment, in this place? To what end(s) am I
harnessing my imagination and joining it to those around me? What are the sources,
roots, origins of my imagined futures? Do I know how to use-the-future to understand
the past in different ways? Do I know how to use-the-future to perceive the present in
different ways? How can imagined futures make it easier to sense and make-sense of
something that was unknowable a moment ago? Are we using-the-future to build the
confidence needed to welcome change, turning uncertainty from a threat into a
resource?
These questions and other related ones point to the potential for imagined futures to give
practical expression to transitions that might take us beyond today’s dominant ways of doing

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13
things. For too long, the prevailing economic and political systems have held the future captive
and prevented both colonial subjects and the privileged from asking certain disruptive
questions (Feukeu, Ajilore & Bourgeois, 2021). Overcoming today’s ‘poverty of the imagination’
requires going beyond what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls “lazy rationality’ lying in a
narrow linear approach to time and the future (2014: 4, 165). Focusing futures processes on
encouraging wondering and question-building ('new questions’ as one of the phases of a futures
literacy laboratory) rather than just seeking path dependent solutions to a foreseen problematic
future is one of the best ways for futurists to tap into both the potential of the present and the
diversity of anticipatory systems and processes in the world.
‘Futures literacy’ as a capability-based approach to embracing complexity and novelty reflects
efforts to overcome the manifest inadequacy of today’s conceptions of human agency. It is about
becoming better at sensing and making sense of the world around us, not only through the lens
of progress, and especially not only someone else’s idea of progress, but by intentionally co-
producing and interrogating imaginary futures with others and using these futures to notice the
novelty and transitional openness of the present.
By ‘walking on the two legs’ of anticipatory systems and processes, ‘anticipation for the future’
and ‘anticipation for emergence’ (Miller 2018), we may be able to reduce our addiction to
making control-seeking bets, opening up our capacity to appreciate and create novelty and
difference while balancing doing and not-doing. ‘Futures literacy’ can decouple personal and
collective agency from vacuous calls to ‘change the world’, focusing on roles and actions that are
specific and within reach. It breaks from superiority-driven ideologies of the past to nurture a
form of inter-dependent, relational agency enabled by an imagination nourished by a greater
capacity to appreciate novelty and difference. It empowers more open experimentation, less
confined by the need to realise pre-defined outcomes, less adverse to failure, while more aware
of the anticipatory assumptions that frame the ethical and utilitarian parameters that arise in
specific contexts.
You are invited...
Starting from the observation that we live in world filled with life and life’s multi-fold
anticipatory systems and processes we want to encourage efforts to better understand and use
this capability. In this article we only address one slice of a bigger effort along these lines and
we do so by presenting a rather conventional type scenario that draws attention to a few salient
features of the potential of the present. Our goal is to incite experiments, tests, forays,
innovations, and aspirations today. Indeed, although we used an imaginary future to draw
attention to the potential of the present we do not need this imagined future to justify our call
for the field of Futures Studies to move to the broad foundations of anticipatory systems and
processes. There are plenty of justifications right now. But we also want to share our intuition
that by making this transition the academic discipline of Futures Studies could benefit in a
variety of ways, as well the communities that are touched in an immense range of ways by
universities.
Certainly, we cannot know if this ‘anticipation turn’ will ever happen, nor if it does will it be
viewed as beneficial or harmful – conclusions that undoubtably depend upon events and points-
of-view that are currently unknowable. But as we already stated, we are not betting on the
future or justifying our position on the basis of the future. Rather, our invitation is anchored in
the transformational potential of a capability-based view of human perception and agency in a
diversity of contexts that the three of us have worked in. We do not know what ‘futures literacy’
might bring for any group seeking to develop it, any more than the early champions of universal
reading and writing could imagine what the development and diffusion of those skills would
bring. We also cannot say for sure that the diverse reasons for and ways of anticipating once
acknowledged will not be co-opted into the dominant framing of time and space that has caused

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14
their denial in the first place (on the denial of Indigenous conceptions of time and space, see e.g.,
Deloria, 2003/1973; Mitchell, 2020; indirectly, Kane, 2014/1961.
All we can say now is that we are convinced that when humans are better able to diversify their
reasons and methods for imagining the future, new forms of experimenting and learning from
experimentation become possible. We can become better able to appreciate difference, question
path dependencies of all kinds – including the oppression and exploitation of colonialism,
engage with novelty, and invent new (and renewed) ways of being together and alive. Simply
put, ‘futures literacy’ can help us be more at home in this constantly transitioning, thoroughly
entangled, creative universe.
Acknowledgements
We acknowledge six individuals who voluntarily read and provided thoughtful comments to an
earlier draft of this essay.
Funding: This work was partly supported by EIT Climate-KIC [task #:
EIT_2.1.5_200492_P555_1A.]. (EIT Climate-KIC is co-funded by the European Union).
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