Continuity, contingency and context: Bringing the historian's cognitive toolkit into university futures and public policy development

Thinking with heritage: Past and present in lived futures

“…Staley (2007), makes a similar argument for the epistemological similarities between historiography and futures work, as does Briggs (1978) when detailing the common ground between history and what he called 'futurology': understanding causation as produced through complex inter-related networks and structures, rather than linear cause and effect; being situated in the present and so reflecting the concerns of the time in their analyses; investigating not one but a range of pasts and futures; recognising the contingent nature of facts; and needing to move beyond extrapolation and prediction to engage with the unknown ("the 'otherness' of both past and future needs to be felt" - Briggs, 1978, p. 450). Given the connections outlined earlier between historiography and futures, and the similar habits of mind valued within each discipline, it is clear that thinking with history can be useful for futurists, in the way that Green (2012), Bradfield et al (2016), and others suggest.…”

“…They make a case for using history in futures work as an 'orientation' (Bradfield et al, 2016, p. 57). Green (2012) describes the foundational stances the disciplines have in common, such as an appetite for employing counterfactual reasoning, and a commitment to challenging deterministic thinking: her suggestion that 'thinking with history' might be useful for futurists, employing the habits of mind developed by historians in order to produce futures that are more sensitive to the challenges of discussing time beyond the present, is a valuable one, as is her recognition of the natural interest in both past and future that arises once policy decisions are situated in a temporal flow. Staley (2007), makes a similar argument for the epistemological similarities between historiography and futures work, as does Briggs (1978) when detailing the common ground between history and what he called 'futurology': understanding causation as produced through complex inter-related networks and structures, rather than linear cause and effect; being situated in the present and so reflecting the concerns of the time in their analyses; investigating not one but a range of pasts and futures; recognising the contingent nature of facts; and needing to move beyond extrapolation and prediction to engage with the unknown ("the 'otherness' of both past and future needs to be felt" - Briggs, 1978, p. 450).…”

Frameworks in Historiography: Explanation, Scenarios, and Futures

“…In this final section, I will discuss the relationship between history and the future from the perspective of historiographical explanation. The connection between historiography and the future has been an area of interest in futures studies (e.g., Bradfield et al 2016;Staley 2010Staley , 2012Green 2012;Bendor et al 2021;Booth et al 2009;Black 2015). The topic has also been brought to the spotlight in the philosophy of history recently by Simon and Tamm in their Historical Futures project (2021;Simon 2022).…”

Internal consistency in a Swedish history curriculum: a study of vertical knowledge discourses in aims, content and level descriptors

“…The reason that this is interpreted as not coming from the historical discipline is that it explicitly states that a link between the past, the present and the future is to be addressed in history education. This is an activity that might not stem from the traditional historical discipline, even though there are historians that focus their interest around this connection (Green, 2012;Staley, 2007). However, the inclusion of these temporal connections is not met with enthusiasm from all areas of the historical discipline (Bonneuil, 2009).…”