Futures literacy through narrative

Liveley, Genevieve; Slocombe, Will; Spiers, Emily

doi:10.1016/j.futures.2020.102663

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…ES: We have focused on how futures literacy enables us to study the future not just as an object of legal and regulatory intervention, but also as a mode through which governance effects are achieved – for example, through temporalities of hope, fear, urgency, nostalgia and so on. As Genevieve Liveley and colleagues say, ‘higher level FL [futures literacy] involves not only looking at the future but also looking at how we look at the future’ (Liveley et al ., 2021, p. 8) – the cultures, norms, discourses and feelings that arise from imaginaries of future possible worlds. But it is not just environmental law pedagogy that stands to gain from a greater emphasis on futures past and present.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical futures and future futures in environmental law pedagogy: exploring ‘futures literacy’

Stokes

Pontin

2022

International Journal of Law in Context

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In this paper, we begin reflecting on how ‘futures literacy’ – recently championed by UNESCO as a vital skill that allows people to better understand the role of the future in what they see and do – might be developed in environmental law pedagogy. Law and legal analysis tend to be absent from futures scholarship and we discuss various ways of engaging with environmental law as an important but underexplored site and means of future-making. We consider our shared teaching of an undergraduate module in which students examine historical legislation for what it says about past ideas of the environment's future and the action within the law necessary to safeguard it; and contemporary texts, including science fiction and poetry, imagining a future for the environment on and through which law operates. Futures literacy, we argue, is at its richest when ‘historical futures’ and ‘future futures’ are read together, or alongside one another.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Historical futures and future futures in environmental law pedagogy: exploring ‘futures literacy’

Stokes

Pontin

2022

International Journal of Law in Context

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“…Researchers in this literature are conscious of the fact that narrative-as a mode of cognitionis intimately linked to transformative thinking. Liveley et al (2021) emphasize the importance of narratives for future thinking, arguing that, since narrative theory aids in recognizing cultural perspectives and also the limits of human imagination, working with narrative tools is vital for enhancing future literacy. Their argument highlights a fundamental connection between sustainability and narratives: The former necessitates developing insights and ideas about an uncertain future while the latter can evoke, formulate and structure those ideas.…”

Section: Sustainability Transition and Future Thinkingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives in economics

Roos

Reccius

2023

Journal of Economic Surveys

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There is growing awareness within the economics profession of the important role narratives play in the economy. Even though empirical approaches that try to quantify economic narratives are getting increasingly popular, there is no theory or even a universally accepted definition of economic narratives underlying this research. First, we review and categorize the economic literature concerned with narratives and work out the different paradigms at play. Only a subset of the literature considers narratives to be active drivers of economic activity. To solidify the foundation of narrative economics, we propose a definition of collective economic narratives, isolating five important characteristics. We argue that, for a narrative to be economically relevant, it must be a sense‐making story that emerges in a social context and suggests action to a social group. We also systematize how a collective economic narrative differs from a topic and from other kinds of narratives that are likely to have less impact on the economy. With regard to the popular use of topic modeling, we suggest that the complementary use of other methods from the natural language processing (NLP) toolkit and the development of new methods is inevitable to go beyond identifying topics and move towards true empirical narrative economics.

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“…Here, science fiction is likely to be the touchstone, as it is the genre of literature that has most obviously concerned itself with imagining the future, but we see the potential for other kinds of crossover. For example, the spoken word poet Emily Spiers has contributed to a broader futures-oriented project that employs oral storytelling, improvisation, and theatrical collaboration to create an anticipatory futures practice (Liveley et al, 2021). But the history and general thrust of science fiction -dating back to Hugo Gernsback's editorial vision for Amazing Stories, which promoted stories of "scientification" that "mingled scientific fact" with "prophetic vision" (Gernsback, 1926(Gernsback, /2017) -make it the genre most obviously closely aligned with the goals of futurist explorations.…”

Section: Traditional Creative Writing Skillsetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Science fiction for hire? Notes towards an emerging practice of creative futurism

Marshall,

Jennings,

Anderton

2023

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This article introduces the term creative futurism to distinguish a type of speculative writing from traditional creative writing practices, specifically those of science fiction. Creative futurism is not a clearly defined field or method of practice but rather a loose array of approaches, examples and contexts, often involving collaborations between writers and stakeholders from other fields. We define it as work which is futures-oriented, uses elements of the traditional creative writing skillset, but is constrained by an additional set of parameters (their purpose, context and requirements). To support this definition, science fiction author Joanne Anderton discusses her experience writing creative, near-future scenarios about the deployment of drones for Trusted Autonomous Systems (a kind of creative futurism in practice). She outlines how she and her stakeholders conceptualised the writing and how she applied traditional creative writing skills within this context. Building upon this, author and critic Kathleen Jennings identifies aesthetic features of traditionally published examples of creative futurism: its heightened focus on technology, its realist-rationalist tone, and the resulting subordination of other aspects of craft such as characterisation. We conclude by discussing aspects of writing practice that might be applied in the future to energise this new form of writing.

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Futures literacy through narrative

Cited by 19 publications

References 19 publications

Historical futures and future futures in environmental law pedagogy: exploring ‘futures literacy’

Historical futures and future futures in environmental law pedagogy: exploring ‘futures literacy’

Narratives in economics

Science fiction for hire? Notes towards an emerging practice of creative futurism

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