|
Cultural diversity as an economic asset: Australian futurists quoted in Salzburg |
|
|
|
|
Monday, 21 April 2008 |
|
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.
|
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 15 May 2008 )
|
|
Read more...
|
|
Imagining new futures: the simple power of story |
|
|
|
|
Written by Jan Lee Martin
|
|
Sunday, 17 February 2008 |
|
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.....
The following article formed the basis for my presentation at the Millennia 2015 conference in Liege, Belgium in March 2008. Theme of the conference was "Women as actors in developing the future", and I decided to explore the role of story and the opportunities that women -- and others -- have to create new stories for the future.
_______________
|
|
Last Updated ( Monday, 24 November 2008 )
|
|
Read more...
|
|
Futures Told, Tamed and Traded |
|
|
|
|
Written by Barbara Adam
|
|
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.
|
|
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 23 January 2008 )
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Don't panic -- it's only the apocalypse |
|
|
|
|
Written by Richard Eckersley
|
|
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.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Whose future is it anyway? |
|
|
|
|
Written by Jan Lee Martin
|
|
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.
|
|
Last Updated ( Friday, 23 February 2007 )
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
The value of values: whose life counts? |
|
|
|
|
Written by Fabienne Goux-Baudiment
|
|
Sunday, 04 February 2007 |
A new book from Professor Mahdi Elmandjra, a respected futurist based in Morocco, explores the question of values and society. It was reviewed by Fabienne Goux-Baudiment in the World Futures Studies Federation's Futures Bulletin in January 2007.
Better intercultural communication, free from deceit and discrimination, would greatly contribute to the building of peace, says Mahdi Elmandjra. Respecting the values of "others" would help to put into perspective the concept of "universal values" without insisting on their artificial adaptation to a reductionist and meaningless universalism, bearing in mind the scale of human history.
Professor Almandjra points out that some western states, although they proclaim themselves as champions of values regarding human rights and democracy, violate them here and there with impunity. The test of this highly claimed universalism will be the day when the life of a Third World citizen will be worth as much as the life of an American, a European or an Israeli.
He shows how the last conflicts in Israel, Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon; the blind support from the western world of the American mega-imperialism and the unacceptable cowardice of most, if not all Arabic governments are as many proofs that w are very far away from these "universal" values.
The world of Professor Elmandjra's earlier book -- The First Civilizational War (1991) is mutating into a war of values.
|
|
Last Updated ( Monday, 05 February 2007 )
|
|
|
The Age of Mammals: looking back on the first quarter of the 21st century |
|
|
|
|
Written by Rebecca Solnit
|
|
Saturday, 06 January 2007 |
 I've been writing the year-end other-news summary for Tomdispatch since
2004; somewhere around 2017, however, the formula of digging up
overlooked stories and grounds for hope grew weary. So for this year,
we've decided instead to look back on the last 25 years of the
twenty-first century -- but it was creatures from sixty million years
ago who reminded me how to do it.
The other day, I borrowed some kids to go gawk with me at the one thing
that we can always count on in an ever-more unstable world:
age-of-dinosaur dioramas in science museums. This one had the usual
dramatic clash between a tyrannosaurus and a triceratops; pterodactyls
soaring through the air, one with a small reptile in its toothy maw;
and some oblivious grazing by what, when I was young in another
millennium, we would have called a brontosaurus. Easy to overlook in
all that drama was the shrew-like mammal perched on a reed or thick
blade of grass, too small to serve even as an enticing pterodactyl
snack. The next thing coming down the line always looks like that
mammal at the beginning -- that's what I told the kids --
inconsequential, beside the point; the official point usually being the
clash of the titans.
|
|
Last Updated ( Saturday, 06 January 2007 )
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
|
<< Start < Prev 1 2 Next > End >>
|
| Results 1 - 27 of 30 |
Future News