Content uploaded by Riel Miller
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Riel Miller on Sep 07, 2024
Content may be subject to copyright.
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 1 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
The alarm clock rings. I wake up, I turn off the alarm clock. This is anticipation-
for-the-future because I don’t want the alarm clock to continue to ring.
I lie in bed. I think about this article. I wonder if I should get out of bed. I wonder if
I have new ideas or ways of explaining the difference between perception and
choice. I think, I want to finish the article. This is anticipation-for-the-future. At the
same time, swirling away in the interstices of my mind, I’m wondering if I might be
able to sketch a diagram (see Annex) that could represent the relationships
linking anticipation with perception and choice. I sense an entangling simultaneity
of anticipation-for-the-future (AfF) and anticipation-for-emergence (AfE).
All the while, lying there in bed, I am both doing and not-doing. Meaning I
experience the present as a mash-up of goal-based imagining, I will get out of
bed, and the liminal wanderings of the not-knowing what will surface as creative
novelty from the tendrils of my quantum patience, biding the times of the thick
present, letting my latent adjacent imaginations transit from not-existing to
emergent.
I am aware that I’m motivated to imagine because I have decided, on the basis of
anticipation-for-the-future, that this article can serve a purpose. But I’m also
fending off the known, flinging my awareness into invention and discovery.
Hosting the silence, place for the emergence of what I do not know yet, a
surfacing of perceptions that I do not yet have, tickled by the open imaginings of
anticipation-for-emergence. In other words, the interwoven flows of my
imagination oscillate between two purposes, and two epistemological well-springs
(see Annex Diagram). I am aware that my experience of this creative emergent
world consists of both the appearance of repetition and the potential of difference,
knowing and not-knowing, doing and not-doing – perceptions that are enabled by
both AfF and AfE imaginings
1
.
+++++++++++++++
Once again, for a variety of reasons, I’d like to offer a response to the
question: what is futures studies (FS)? I’m not trying to be irreverent,
confrontational, dismissive, or boring… although some may consider that this
missive falls into one or all of those categories of nuisances. As best I can, I’m
trying to respond to questions posed to me (and others) as many people
attempt to understand and engage in learning voyages in the ‘land of FS’. So,
for what it is worth, what do I consider to be the most coherent and useful
definition of FS?
To begin with there are the two words. One is futures and the other is studies.
So, FS is a field – a delimited set of theories and practices, forms of
specialized knowledge – that are used when ‘studying’ the ‘future’. However,
as everyone knows, the future is not only unknowable, because it does not
1
In practice AfF and AfE are symbiotic, part of a whole, in the present moment. What cannot be whole in
the present moment are the dierences (phenomena) of novel emergence, since such emergence is
unknowable in advance. Thus it is ‘reality’ that presents distinctiveness, hence new boundaries, that
oblige a confrontation with continuity and discontinuity, endogenous and exogenous change (see Ogilvy),
and it is why a meta-cognitive awareness of dierent kinds of imagining makes emergence more
comprehensible.
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 2 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
exist, it is also expected to be characterized by novelty or ‘difference’ (not just
repetition) when the ‘later’ becomes the present. This novelty is creative and,
to use the terminology of Stuart Kauffman, goes ‘pop’ when ‘shit happens’ (to
be more colloquial). Thus, at least as I see it, there are two fundamental
premises for defining FS: first, explicit futures are necessarily imaginary; and
second, when futures become presents emergence (see Jay Ogilvy,
forthcoming) is the word, splendidly ebullient with previously unknowable
novelty
2
.
Picking up on the first premise first, the obvious implication – consistently
present in the definitions used by most past writing about FS (from Herman
Kahn to Eleonora Masini and Sohail Inayatullah to Jim Dator) – is that when
humans think consciously or explicitly about futures we engage with our innate
capacity to imagine. Futures can only be imagined, for one reason or another,
deploying one way of knowing or another. Where do these imaginings come
from? Wendell Bell, and many others (Jenny Andersson, Maree Conway, Erik
Overland, etc.), offer similar perspectives – imagined futures are sourced from
the “worldviews and myths that underlie each future (Bell).” Okay, but then the
question comes back, ‘imagining what?’ This is the crucial step in nailing down
a definition of FS that is more specific to the ‘later-than-now’, not just any and
all manifestations of the human imagination.
In response to this question, the vast majority of existing definitions focus on
specific expressions of human imagining that can all be sourced or
categorized in terms of the human desire to influence the future (see Bertrand
de Jouvanel, Richard Slaughter, Michel Godet, Hazel Henderson, etc.). Thus,
efforts to imagine the future are typically (in the FS literature) categorized into
three broad categories, imagining: possible
3
, probable or preferable futures (to
once again use Bell’s formulation). In this way FS becomes the study of how
humans achieve certain objectives. In other words, the different ways that
human agency might be able to cause preconceived outcomes. This in turn
means that FS is the study of the formulation of goals (imagined futures) from
the perspective of choice and causality that can result in the realization (or
not) of explicit, not yet achieved goals.
One of the major problems with this definition of FS is that what it is supposed
to study does not yet exist. The relationships of choice and causality to
outcomes can be unpacked only after the actual events provide the raw
2
Note ‘novelty’ is not necessarily something unique that has never ever existed before in this universe as a
whole. It can be something that is different to the universes of a specific being or POV or history or set of
relations. To make a long story short, for the purposes here, novelty is in the eye of the beholder.
3
The notion of possibility, sometimes supplemented with plausibility, does not in my view disrupt a logical
ordering that situates imaginability as not-necessarily related to causality or actualization (Kaufmann and Radin,
2023). The pre-conditions of imaginability – the ability to imagine and the existence of a universe characterized
by creative emergence (and I hypothesize that the former evolved due the conditions provided by the latter) – are
outside of the conventional (non-quantum) understanding of future possibilities as probabilistic phenomenon.
Hence the relationship between imagination and perception can exist outside of the possible/plausible and to
encompass that creative aspect of the role of imagining requires going beyond AfF.
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 3 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
material for such speculations. That is, assessing the actual sequence of
events that appear to link choices to causality to outcomes depends on the
future having turned into the present. The details of actual choices, apparent
causal connections, and what really happened, cannot be studied in the
present – there is no there there. For sure there are plenty of ex-post stories
recounting the glory of human prescience and perseverance. All very flattering
to the pretensions of a vain species, but as everyone knows, such narratives
do not depict the actual experiences of how things happened from the
perspective of the ‘anticipatory present’.
Here a brief and far from complete historical aside might be helpful. FS in the
second half of the 20th Century found many of its originating impulses from a
profound sense that the species posed an existential threat to itself. WWII,
denominated as the second in a series, a mega-trend if there ever was one,
along with the atomic bomb, the industrialization of genocides, and
experiences with different incarnations of totalitarianism, all pointed to the
need to find ways to ‘save’ the future of humanity. The World Futures Studies
Federation, as well as many other organizations and thought leaders in fields
like strategic planning, Peace Studies, change management, and both
‘foresight’ and ‘prospective’ (as slightly different mashups of planning), were
infused with different degrees of quasi-messianic or heroic impulses. For a
good account of the waning and waxing of these currents, along with other
forces and outcomes related to debates on the theories and practices within
FS in the post-WWII period, take a look at Jenny Andersson’s excellent history
The Future of the World (and my review, Miller, 2022).
For now, suffice it to note that many members of FS communities have been
very proud and deeply entangled with the mission of making the world (or
company, or community, or…) a ‘better’ (more successful, less vulnerable,
etc.) place. In part because it is an itch that needs to be scratched –
ideological or colonizing stances towards the future are hegemonic – and so
promising or hinting at such desired deliverables becomes part of the sales
pitch. That said, I believe that in practice much of the FS community – as
specialists in imagining futures – are not only aware of the diversity of different
‘anticipatory systems and processes’ (ASP) that generate human imaginings,
but are skilled in applying these different ASP to different circumstances.
Comprehending and wielding ASP is what the FS community does. I also
want to make clear that as part of designing and implementing efforts to
imagine different futures it is crucial to take into account the interface and
functioning of decision-making. What I am arguing here is that FS, in both
theory and practice, would benefit from distinguishing AfF and AfE, perception
and choice. Furthermore, by having a clearer and more practical grasp of the
diversity of ASP, FS could contribute more effectively to cultivating futures
literacy – which in turn might change the context within which efforts to
imagine the future unfold. Reducing confusion about AfF and AfE, perception
and choice, would not only make it easier to diffuse this set of competences,
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 4 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
but could also contribute to the generalisation of such competences, achieving
a change in the conditions of change.
Now, let’s return to defining FS. The previous observations about ‘futures’ and
‘studies’ bring us full circle, back to the point made previously: explicit or
conscious human futures can only be imagined. But it radically re-orients the
gaze or parameters of the field by displacing the subject of FS from a pre-
occupation with efforts to colonize tomorrow to a more general project (albeit
with a different initial and primary utility): to study the attributes and roles
played by human imagining of the not-past, not-present. At a practical level
this offers a solution to the problem of trying to study something that doesn’t
exist – the future. In this way, FS becomes the study of the diversity of actual
expressions and implications of the ‘anticipatory systems and processes’
(ASP) that frame our imaginings in daily life.
The manifold virtues (and some drawbacks, depending on one’s POV) of
adopting an ASP framework for understanding human imagining of the not-
past, not-present starts from the fact that ASP can be found in all living
organisms (see Rosen, Poli, Nadin, etc.). This clues us in to the need to
search for the diversity and omnipresence of ASP in living organisms as the
expression of the integration of temporalities into life forms that have evolved
in times. Further, the theorisation of ASP requires and enables the elaboration
of analytical scaffoldings or frameworks that allow us to sense and make-
sense of distinct kinds of imaginings of the not-past, not-present. So, FS is the
study of ASP, i.e. the components of the narrative and analytical frames that
make up the “worldviews and myths that underlie each future (Bell)”.
It may seem like this is going in circles, please bear with me. What is
important here, from a definitional perspective, is that FS is no longer
exclusively focused on ‘possible, preferable, and probable’ as affordances for
efforts to plan the future. Instead, there is a more general and open orientation
towards the study of the presence of the future in human consciousness
through the functioning of anticipatory systems and processes (ASP). Such
ASP can be observed any time a person imagines the not-past, not-present
(although typically ASP are tacit and thus not so easy to detect and classify –
which is the point of the ‘futures literacy framework’ (FLF) see below). Okay,
so now the task that defines FS becomes the exploration of the attributes,
roles, and functioning of ASP.
At first glance, this does not seem to get us very far since the study of
imaginings of the not-past, not-present involves a vast and very interesting
range of unquestionably relevant fields like psychology, neuroscience,
anthropology, semiotics, economics, political science, etc. What is FS’ claim
to specialisation, a distinct relevance and value-added that is not covered by
other fields? Here I think the key to setting boundaries for both the theory and
practice of FS is to confine such efforts to understanding the role of imagining
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 5 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
the not-past, not-present in perception (see my chapter: Liberating the Human
Imagination). Or, how do the ASP that generate imaginings of the not-past,
not-present, enable humans to sense and make-sense of this universe’s
‘realities’ – its fundamental complexity or unknowability, creativity, and novelty.
I hope it is evident that this formulation of the specific subject that FS studies
is meant to be open. One that encompasses the many different attributes,
roles, and functionings of conscious imaginings of the not-past, not-present.
From divination and eschatological narratives of the future to forecasts and
foresight scenarios, the full range of human ASP (ontological and
epistemological) are included. This means that FS concerns more than
forecasting, foresight, or effective planning (which goes by many names, from
strategy to ‘anticipation’ (Poli, 2024)). This may seem, on the one hand, like
an expansion of FS – outside of the familiar parameters of the field when it is
confined to its utility and relevant tools for planning/making things happen.
While on the other hand, it is likely to be taken as a disappointing and
illegitimate excision of what seems most important about FS – its vocation to
‘create the future’. On the latter point, I want to argue that restricting FS to the
exploration of the relationship between ASP and perception is essential for
bringing greater clarity and coherence to the study of both perception and
choice.
Insisting on a strong theoretical dividing line between efforts to understand the
human agency/outcomes nexus and efforts to understand the ASP/perception
nexus, contributes significantly to what might be called more fertile theory
(Kauffman, 2023) that nurtures concepts and hypotheses, evidence and
experiments, that reveal and inspire sensing and making-sense of otherwise
incomprehensible, invisible or novel phenomena. By loosening the
preoccupation with efforts to understand why and how choices are made, FS
moves away from claiming a privileged relationship to the achievement (or
not) of specific futures, good or bad. Instead, by constraining what FS studies
to the relationship between ASP and perception it gains a stronger claim on
perception. FS expands, inviting us to grasp the roles of anticipation-for-the-
future (AfF), or how imagining the later-than-now in order to influence the
future shapes perception, AND how anticipation-for-emergence (AfE), or how
liberating our imagination to invent not-pasts, not-presents with purposes
other than colonizing the future also shapes perception.
Separating the theory of FS from theories of agency/outcomes overcomes a
major obstacle to formulating theoretical foundations that are open to the
diversity of ASP. This is because efforts to imagine reasons and methods for
linking human choices to outcomes restricts what is deemed relevant
imagining. Expanding FS’ theoretical foundations to include imagining that is
unconstrained by reasons and methods of planning is important for a number
of reasons, not least because imagination in the service of perception, as the
constitutive subject of the field, is inherently pluri-epistemic – there is not just
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 6 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
one way to know the human imagination – understanding it requires distinct
epistemologies (linked to the ontological differences that characterize
imagined not-pasts, not-presents). Further, research into the ontological
diversity of ASP fosters a greater openness to the lived experiences of
epistemic diversity, the specificities of ASP in context.
Another equally crucial implication, as already noted, is that amongst the
many roles played by the imagination there is one that is particularly important
for FS – the roles that imagining the not-past, not-present play in what people
sense and make-sense of in the present. Allow me to underscore that this is
not, at least initially, about choices, decisions, or agency meant to influence
the future on the basis of some speculation about outcomes, causes, or
preferences. Quite the opposite, it is the powerful role played by – the why,
how, and what of people’s imagining about the not-past, not-present – in
orienting and framing perception. And, as dynamic as perception maybe,
always framed by the affordances of the past and present, when it comes to
planning – making choices amongst mutually exclusive options (irrevocable
bets) – the menu precedes selection. Can’t order or bet-on what you can’t
perceive. From this perspective, not conflating the future and choice, or
predictions (contextually ‘credible’ speculations) with decisions, is
fundamentally important for both understanding the specific roles of imagining
the not-past, not-present in perception AND for more accurately framing
efforts – the theory and practice – of decision making, be it from the
management, administration, or leadership points-of-view (policy, political
science, economics, various ideologies, etc.).
Put succinctly, if FS is at its core the study of ASP, then the conventional
preoccupation of FS with influencing the future can largely be located outside
the boundaries of the field. Perception yes, planning only in the specific case
of ASP/perception’s contribution to the framing of agential/choice/outcome
activities. Decision making processes as the modus for realizing outcomes
becomes another field – once again such fields as the study of management,
strategy, politics, history, allocation, behaviour, etc. Perception and choice are
obviously related, there are overlaps, but one is not coextensive with the
other. Certainly, the imaginings generated by people’s anticipatory systems
and processes play a role in planning and efforts to influence the future in one
way or another, but at the level of theories of each, anticipation and planning
are two different fields of inquiry. Perhaps one way of thinking about this
differentiation is to compare FS to the role statistics plays in planning – a
major contributor to describing what and how to plan – but clearly also a
distinct field of its own and of relevance to many other fields, not just planning.
Disentangling imagined futures and agency, understood as the capacity of
humans to take actions (or not), brings a series of major advantages for
understanding and being in a universe in which complexity, as a state or basic
condition (not a variable), prevails. Not least of which is that it may offer a way
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 7 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
to operationalise more effective or practical approaches to taking into account
the co-existence of risk and uncertainty. The standard distinction regarding
risk and uncertainty (see Knight, North, Ogilvy, deLanda, Kauffman, etc.)
makes it clear that one cannot be turned into the other, even if that is what
happens in practice when uncertainties are assumed away – ceteris paribus.
Ontologically and epistemologically risk and uncertainty are distinct – the
question or challenge is how to respect this distinctiveness while also
addressing the simultaneity of both in the emergent present. I think it is
suggestive to think of the experience of separate but inter-dependent by
invoking metaphors such as walking on two-legs or seeing with both eyes.
Let me wrap this up with three closing remarks.
First is that the definition of FS as the study of ASP for perception provides a
clear and simple way of understanding the idea of ‘futures literacies’ (FL).
Obviously not as a way of knowing the future, as if it existed. And equally
obviously not as the royal road for turning choices into outcomes. Rather, FL
consists of the different degrees of familiarity or range of competencies that
can be acquired by exercising and reflecting on the workings of the universal
human capability to imagine the not-past, not-present. FL are practiced skills,
comprised of acquired knowledge and specialised practices, taking many
diverse forms, that reflect the reality of the diversity of ASP.
Someone who is more futures literate is able to engage in sensing and sense-
making, meta-cognitive activities, in ways that take into account the two sets
of distinctions, between AfF/AfE and between perception/choice. Here the link
between FS and FL is straightforward – FS studies the diversity of ASP and
FL directly reflect the awareness, meta-cognitive and practical, of the diversity
of attributes and roles of ASP (so plural temporalities within and across
contexts/cultures). To be futures literate is to know, in different ways, in
different contexts, and in different degrees, why and how one imagines the
not-past, not-present.
Second, by redefining FS as the study of the ASP that frame imagined not
pasts, not presents, with a clear recognition that imagining the later-than-now
feeds the sensing and sense-making of perception, making it much easier to
relinquish the conflation of imagined futures with choice and thereby find a
balance between betting and emergence. In turn this might, from a speculative
scenarios perspective, be a crucial ingredient in transitional
processes/experiments that enable our species to mature out of
monumentalism. This is a longer discussion and takes us beyond the topic of
this text (see my forthcoming: Beyond the Death Sentence of Striving for
Better Futures). Suffice it to say for now, that our constantly evolving, messy,
and pluri-dimensional awarenesses (frames, stories, identities, etc.) are often
poisoned or immobilized by the arrogance and quest for superiority that
imprisons our capacity to imagine the not-past, not-present. The monoculture
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 8 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
of the imagination, yoked to managing, controlling, creating the future, is toxic
and perhaps changing the way we define FS and cultivating awareness of
ASP to enhance perception may facilitate humans becoming better able to
experiment with transitions away from the immensely destructive immaturity
and inertia of our long-standing monumentalism.
Lastly there are few other practical advantages for FS that arise from adopting
an ASP/perception theoretical foundation (as opposed to the premise/promise
of having a special role in changing the world). One advantage has to do with
the oft heard complaint from the people and organisations that engage FS
specialists to conduct what they see as ‘due diligence’ about the future – that
in the end the futures report or project had little impact. There is
disappointment, even if the FS specialist insists on ‘buyer beware’ caveats,
the ultimate unknowability of the future and the inherent ambiguity of what
futurists bring to the mix. Clients still complain that their efforts to think about
the future didn’t change the world. Here the trouble cannot be overcome
without changing expectations, and often the misplaced promises of FS, to
use futures thinking to deliver on the realisation of winning choices, best bets.
Instead, FS in the service of perception, can play a role similar to becoming
more reading and writing literate – proficiency (at different levels) – of
understanding the diversity of reasons, methods, and contexts for imagining
the not-past, not-present. Lacking such foundations, awareness of the
diversity of ASP and the implications of such diversity, it is no wonder FS
remains marginal and misunderstood and that even practitioners typically are
artisans skilled with one particular tool or set of tools but not equipped, to use
theory to shape designs and practices to the different reasons we imagine,
using paradigmatically distinct epistemologies for imagining, in different
specific contexts. Again, by changing the role and expectations of FS, so that
it underpins a capability that is open ended, without trying to narrow it down to
serving the realisation of specific ends (good or bad), enhances its role in
expanding perception’s contribution to choice. Although not as THE
determinant of choice. This avoids the trap of false promises to control the
future and points to the potential for FS to be an enabler of changes in the
conditions of change via the cultivation and diffusion of greater futures
literacies competencies.
A final payoff worth noting is about research and the scientific viability of FS.
In my view, situating the point of origin of the field in the study of the
relationship between ASP and perception offers a quite conventional and
convincing/credible research subject/domain. Of course, the pre-requisite is
that ASP can be defined as a meaningful scientific subject. This in turn
requires clear and precise definitions of what are anticipatory systems and
processes. I’ve offered one take on such a theory in the Futures Literacy
Framework (FLF, in Transforming the Future, Miller, 2018). The FLF is
certainly preliminary, incomplete, and in need of continued research, revision,
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 9 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
etc. But it does propose a set of definitions upon which to scaffold hypothesis
testing through experimentation and evidence gathering – in other words:
research.
Again, this is not the place to go into the details of the double frame for
assessing ASP, narrative and analytical. Nor to elaborate how the anticipatory
assumptions that make up the narrative and analytical frames can be
categorized using ontological and epistemological parameters that allow the
identification of different sets of anticipatory assumptions on the basis of such
criteria. Although, I believe there is ample confirmation from futures literacy
laboratories (action-research/living labs) from around the world that the FLF is
useful for detecting, inventing, and categorizing ASP. Equally affirming is the
utility of the FLF in the design of efforts to imagine the future and the surfacing
of ASP in more explicit forms. Of course, critiques and alternative frameworks
are very welcome – that is the way our understanding of the world advances.
++++++++++++
Post-script. One quick clarifying note, to redress what seems to be a
misunderstanding of my views in Roberto Poli’s recent Handbook of Futures Studies
(Chapter 1, Poli, 2024). I would not replace the term Futures Studies with the term
anticipation. I consider FS, as I think is the case for most members of the FS
community, as an umbrella term covering the many different ways people think about
the future. However, one of the main reasons for taking an ASP approach to FS is
that it encompasses an even greater diversity of expressions of futures thinking,
including how both AfF and AfE are relevant to both perception and choice. To refer
once again to Poli’s first chapter in the Handbook of Anticipation, the “clarification of
the intended meaning of the field’s basic terms requires a theoretical framework.”
Exactly what the FLF proposes.
+++++++++++++++
Annex: Diagram 1: Connecting Imagination – Perception – Choice
Imagining Begins
Sparks/catalysts/stimului –
external/internal
Selection of purpose of imagining
AfF AfE
Eg. AA1 –
‘economism’
futures
Anticipation for the
future: AA1,2,3,4
Anticipation for
Emergence: AA 5,6
Eg. AA5 – futures in
absence of
‘economism’
Eg. economic
forecasting
Imagining
systems/methods
/processes
(ASP-F)
Imagining
systems/methods
/processes
(ASP-E)
Eg. life in a world
without economic
‘theology’
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 10 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
Eg. projecting
economic
futures for fiscal
calculations
(budgets) –
note causal
affordances
and theories/
evidence of
functioning -
past
Specific narrative
and analytical
assumptions: use
the past to generate
perception.
Dominant methods:
probabilistic and
normative models,
ideological
inspiration –
‘progress’
Specific narrative
and analytical
assumptions:
liberate perception
from past.
Dominant methods:
dreams,
hallucination, play,
excess, openness,
exercising the
imagination
Eg. Imagining life in
the absence of
dualisms like:
tool/agent;
supply/demand;
private/public;
individual/collective;
superior/subordinate
Representation
– narratives,
story-telling –
rituals,
negotiations,
recursive AfF
(internal and/or
external)
Perceptions of
doing – refinement
of doing.
Combinatorial
endogenous
novelty.
Options for the
budget.
Perceptions of
exogenous novelty
and not-doing –
refinement of not-
doing
Fantasies of who
knows what…
Representation –
narratives, story-
telling – rituals –
repetitions/patterns
Making bets –
precipitation,
trigger, tipping
point, deadline
Choices
Wisdom
Always unique.
Selected Bibliography
Andersson, J. (2018). The future of the world: Futurology, futurists, and the struggle for the
post Cold War imagination. Oxford University Press.
Bell, W. (2003). Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History,
Purposes, Knowledge. Transaction Publishers.
Bloch, Ernst, 1885-1977. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, Mass. :MIT Press, 1995.
Conway, M. (2015). Foresight: An Introduction. Thinking Futures.
Dator, J. (1996). Futures studies as applied knowledge. In R. Slaughter (Ed.), New Thinking
for a New Millennium. Routledge.
de Jouvenel, B. (1967). The art of conjecture (N. Lary, Trans.). Basic Books. (Original work
published 1964)
DeLanda, M. (2006). A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity.
Continuum.
Godet, M. (2001). Creating Futures: Scenario Planning as a Strategic Management Tool.
Economica.
Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming. Foresight, 10(1), 4-21.
Defining Futures Studies: Locating Anticipation
Riel Miller – work in progress… Page 11 of 11 Draft 0.9 – September 6, 2024
Henderson, H. (1996). Building a win-win world: Life beyond global economic warfare.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Kahn, H., & Wiener, A. J. (1967). The year 2000: A framework for speculation on the next
thirty-three years. Macmillan.
Kauffman, S. A. (1995). At home in the universe: The search for the laws of self-organization
and complexity. Oxford University Press.
Kauffman, S. A., and Radin, D. (2023). “Quantum aspects of the brain-mind relationship: A
hypothesis with supporting evidence”, Biosystems, Elsevier.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2022.104820
Knight, F. H. (1921). Risk, uncertainty, and profit. Houghton Mifflin.
Masini, Eleonora. (1993) Why Futures Studies? London: Grey Seal.
Miller, R. (2024). “Liberating the Human Imagination: Futures Literacy and the Diversification
of Anticipation”. Chapter 9, in Poli, R., (Ed.), Handbook of Futures Studies, Edward Elgar.
Miller, R. (Jan. 2025) “Beyond the Death Sentence of Striving for Better Futures”, in
Shamieyh, M. (Ed). Practices of Futurecasting: Ways of sharing imagined tomorrows.
Birkhäsuser.
Nadin, M. (2012). Anticipation: Learning from the past. Cognitive Systems Monographs,
Springer.
North, D. C. (1999). Dealing with a non-ergodic world: Institutional economics, property
rights, and the global environment. Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum, 10(1), 1–12.
Ogilvy, J. (Forthcoming). Coming Together: How the Emergence of Life, Evolution and
Language Shed Light on Emergent Phenomena from Consciousness and Love to Money
and Artistic Creativity.
Poli, R. (2024). “Introduction: the subtle interplay between Futures Studies and Anticipation
Theory”, Chapter 1, in Poli, R., (Ed.), Handbook of Futures Studies, Edward Elgar.
Rosen, R. (1991). Life itself: A comprehensive inquiry into the nature, origin, and fabrication
of life. Columbia University Press.
Slaughter, R. (1996). The knowledge base of futures studies as an evolving process.
Futures, 28(9), 799-812.
