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Cultural diversity as an economic asset: Australian futurists quoted in Salzburg |
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Written by Charles Brass
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Monday, 21 April 2008 |
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Cultural diversity is now an economic asset for Europe, Alain Ruche of the European Commission said at the Salzburg Global Seminar on Thursday (17/4/08). And it is especially an asset in the emerging generation of international relations between knowledge-based societies.
At its meeting in Lisbon in 2000, the European Union agreed to a strategy aimed at making Europe the most competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. In his paper Alain Ruche drew on the work of scholars and thinkers around the world, including several Australian futurists, to demonstrate that this strategy needs further reform.
“The EU has understood the emergence of knowledge as an economic resource, but not as yet as the main resource in the knowledge society,” he said.
“We need to address the education challenge facing a knowledge society. Colleges and universities in Europe are still educating students for a world that no longer exists.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 May 2008 )
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Imagining new futures: the simple power of story |
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Written by Jan Lee Martin
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Sunday, 17 February 2008 |
We are immersed in a world of complex and accelerating change. Every
day it becomes harder to deal with that complexity, and more important
that we do. Indeed it is essential – not just to anticipate and avoid
risks, but also to anticipate and create opportunities. How can a tool
as simple as a story be of any use?
This paper discusses the fundamental role of story in living systems,
including people, organizations and communities. Examples show how
stories can strengthen, heal, teach and inspire at each of these
levels. One of the stories dates back 20,000 years, others tell of
children and young people already changing the future.
Stories help us to share knowledge, to work together to meet the
uncertainties of change. They give us strength and coherence. But
stories also create change. They fire the imagination. We create the
future through the stories we imagine. How can we create the future –
how can we create anything? -- if we can’t imagine it first?
And we really, seriously, need to create new stories for the future.
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 05 July 2008 )
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Futures Told, Tamed and Traded |
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Written by Barbara Adam
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Wednesday, 23 January 2008 |
This paper explores explicit approaches to the future and  locates
contemporary perspectives in their wider historical context. In five
sections it considers how the future has been told, tamed, traded and
transformed and how it is traversed today in a way that is superimposed
on those earlier relations. It distinguishes the embedded, embodied,
contextual future from contemporary perspectives of a decontextualised
future emptied of content, which is open to exploration and
exploitation, calculation and control. It shows how the abstraction of
the future is implicated in both the progress of industrial-capitalist
societies and the major problems that face these societies today. In
the concluding section it suggests that there is much to learn from the
conceptual tools honed by predecessors in their efforts to render the
future more knowable.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 23 January 2008 )
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Don't panic -- it's only the apocalypse |
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Written by Richard Eckersley
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Monday, 23 July 2007 |
 A few years ago, my then-teenage son and I were watching world news on television. An item began about the humanitarian tragedy in Darfur, Sudan (which is still with us). ‘Can we turn this off, Dad?’ my son said. I asked why. ‘It’s depressing,’ he replied. ‘I don’t need reminding what a horrible place the world is.’
It is depressing, and it is becoming more depressing as our perceptions of the world and its future are increasingly shaped by images of global or distant threat and disaster: earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, droughts, bushfires, disease pandemics, war, terrorist attacks and famine. While these hazards are mostly not new, previous fears were never so sustained and varied, nor so powerfully reinforced by the frequency, immediacy and vividness of today’s media images. This effect seems certain to intensify as global warming and other threats begin to impact more deeply on our lives.
Most of the attention on how we address these threats has focused on economics and technology. How we react psychologically will be just as important. This response involves subtle and complex interactions between the world ‘out there’ and the world ‘in here’ (in our minds). These have implications for both personal wellbeing and social cohesion and action.
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Whose future is it anyway? |
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Written by Jan Lee Martin
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Thursday, 22 February 2007 |
 Is it time to find a new description for the people we used to call our leaders? Or could they learn from an Asian tiger how to really lead the way into the future?
When the Futures Foundation asked high school students in Gosford about their visions for the future the response was largely non-verbal, but painfully clear. Translated, the downcast eyes and shoulder shrugs said, “Why are you asking us? We can’t do anything about it anyway.” Yet these were students who had volunteered (or been volunteered?) to take part in a visioning exercise called Central Coast 2020.
So we sent them out in pairs to interview their community leaders -- politicians, business leaders, media and sports identities -- and invited them to report back to the group on their interviewees’ visions for the year 2020.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 23 February 2007 )
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