The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020 updates previous efforts that brought together representative collections of the best work of futures studies and foresight. The works of leading practitioners and emerging voices are woven together to create a picture of how the landscape of futures thinking has evolved since the last edition in 2005. The thirty-one essays follow a reader-friendly house style aimed at practitioners and students.
The study of futures is an area of increasing interest and one that is comprehensively examined in this new collection, with contributions from key names in the field.
The faculty at the University of Houston's program in Futures Studies share their comprehensive, integrated approach to preparing foresight professionals and assisting others doing foresight projects. Provides an essential guide to developing classes on the future or even establishing whole degree programs.
This insightful Handbook emphasizes the unique contribution that Futures Studies offers when understanding and managing current situations. Contributing authors argue that by learning to examine the future in the present, individuals and organizations can expand their abilities to analyze, assess and ultimately make better decisions. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.
Futures studies is a new field of inquiry involving systematic and explicit thinking about alternative futures. It aims to demystify the future, make possibilities for the future more known to us, and increase human control over the future. Author Wendell Bell brings together futurist intellectual tools, describing and explaining not only the methods, but also the nature, concepts, theories, and exemplars of the field. Now available in paperback with a new preface from the author, Foundations of Future Studies is the fundamental work on the subject. Bell illustrates how this sphere of intellectual activity offers hope for the future of humanity and concrete ways of realizing that hope in the real world of everyday life. His book will appeal to all interested in futures studies, sociology, economics, political science, and history.
Storylistening makes the case for the urgent need to take stories seriously in order to improve public reasoning. Dillon and Craig provide a theory and practice for gathering narrative evidence that will complement and strengthen, not distort, other forms of evidence, including that from science. Focusing on the cognitive and the collective, Dillon and Craig show how stories offer alternative points of view, create and cohere collective identities, function as narrative models, and play a crucial role in anticipation. They explore these four functions in areas of public reasoning where decisions are strongly influenced by contentious knowledge and powerful imaginings: climate change, artificial intelligence, the economy, and nuclear weapons and power. Vivid performative readings of stories from The Ballad of Tam-Lin to The Terminator demonstrate the insights that storylistening can bring and the ways it might be practised. The book provokes a reimagining of what a public humanities might look like, and shows how the structures and practices of public reasoning can evolve to better incorporate narrative evidence. Storylistening aims to create the conditions in which the important task of listening to stories is possible, expected, and becomes endemic. Taking the reader through complex ideas from different disciplines in ways that do not require any prior knowledge, this book is an essential read for policymakers, political scientists, students of literary studies, and anyone interested in the public humanities and the value, importance, and operation of narratives.
In recent decades, trends, such as educational expansion and globalization, have caused structural changes in higher education worldwide. To successfully place higher education institutions in an environment characterized by global competition, various nations have launched excellence initiatives that pursue the goal of producing universities that attain the label of “excellent”, “world-class”, or “elite”. These institutions are perceived as developing future leaders who foster positive change in society. Against this background, initiatives that foster elite higher education institutions must include various institutional factors. To holistically design initiatives an understanding of what constitutes an elite higher education institution is necessary. Against the background of the institutions’ relevance for developing leaders for society, investigating their connection to leadership education must be addressed as well. This book adopts a future-oriented perspective, developing scenarios that consider a variety of future developments which influence higher education as a whole and elite institutions in particular.
