The World of 2020 and Alternative Futures. Volume 3.

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
AIR UNIV MAXWELL AFB AL
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Futures ◽  
The World

Future Tense: Harnessing Design Futures Methods to Facilitate Young People’s Exploration of Transformative Change for Sustainability

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina Angheloiu ◽  
Leila Sheldrick ◽  
Mike Tennant ◽  
Goldie Chaudhuri
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Transformative Change ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
Future Tense ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Sense Of Ownership ◽  
The World ◽  
Ideal Approach ◽  
Emergent Change

The research starts from the premise that as the world is changing rapidly and in nonlinear ways, we are educating future practitioners for jobs and contexts that don’t yet exist. They instead need to be equipped to work for and with uncertainty to be able to grapple with the scale and pace of emergent change. The fields of design and futures studies bring significant insights to this challenge, including an array of methods, tools, and frameworks for prospective and systemic explorations of alternative futures. The emerging field of design futures can be framed as ways to develop and deploy prompts, artifacts, and narratives to critically interrogate tomorrow’s societal debates today; as such, it is intentional from the outset in its pursuit of preferable futures and therefore social and environmental justice. The process of imagining the future is an active, values-laden social practice, which requires a layered approach to a methodology to surface and challenge dominant patterns—making it an ideal approach for training the young people who will shape our future. This article reports on the design and delivery of participatory workshops that employ design futures methods to facilitate the exploration of transformative change for sustainability. These workshops were conducted with young people aged sixteen to seventeen to equip them to develop and explore alternative futures. The results suggest that design futures methods can facilitate participants from non-design backgrounds to develop alternative futures and artifacts that might sit within them. It was found that developing a sense of ownership was key to enabling participants to effectively reflect on alternative futures and their implications. Finally, the study highlights the potential for these methods to inform both design and sustainability pedagogy.

Feeling a Shared History through Song: “A Flower in the Rainy Night” as a Key Cultural Symbol in Taiwan

2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 64-81
Author(s):  
Nancy Guy
Keyword(s):  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Cultural Symbol ◽  
The Past ◽  
Shared History ◽  
Mayoral Election ◽  
The World

Released in 1934, “A Flower in the Rainy Night” (U iā hoe) is often considered one of the most heart-rending of old Taiwanese songs. On the eve of the 2002 Taipei mayoral election, Taiwan's former president, Lee Teng-hui, closed the rally for the underdog candidate by leading a crowd of 50,000 in singing the song. An analysis of ethnographic, literary, and media sources indicates that the song serves as an elaborating symbol and aids in conceptualizing the order of the world, making ties between the past and present, and offering visions of alternative futures.

Dub, Utopia and the Ruins of the Caribbean

2021 ◽  
pp. 026327642110257
Author(s):  
Joe P.L. Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Original Version ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

The weathered stone, collapsed lintels and hollow roofs of the ruin have long evoked a sense of pathos, standing as monuments to the disastrous contours of history and the possibility of alternative futures. In this article, I ask: What is the meaning of the ruin in the postcolonial context of the Caribbean? There are few physical ruins in the Caribbean, resulting in a feeling of lack: the architectural landscape fails to speak to the catastrophes of slavery and colonialism. Dub, a subgenre of Jamaican reggae, responds to this sense of deprivation. The dub producers of the 1970s decomposed reggae songs, creating ruinous constructions where crucial elements of the original version are missing. Fragmented dub compositions act as icons of the traumatic history of the Caribbean and a utopian pique to the imagination, forcing the listener to fill in the gaps and imagine the world remade.

scholarly journals The Global Business of Sport in a Brave New World: Conceptualising a Framework for Alternative Futures

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. Jackson ◽  
Marcelle C. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Women's Sport ◽  
Global Business ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
The World ◽  
Brave New World ◽  
Sports Illustrated ◽  
Impact Sport

In July 1991, Sports Illustrated published a special issue featuring two articles that prognosticated about what sport would look like 10 years later. As the world entered the 21st century, Sports Illustrated writers, Oscar Johnson and Ron Fimrite, offered their visions of sport in the year 2001. Their analysis highlighted how a range of economic, social and technological changes in society would impact on how sport is structured, produced and consumed, but also offered insights into the future of the major professional sport leagues in North America. It has been 30 years since they publicised their views and, while technology continues to impact sport, the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the world to pause and to consider a range of deep, soul-searching questions about the nature of society, including sport. Against this background, we consider the opportunities and challenges for sport in the 21st century. The paper is divided into three sections including: (1) a reflection on the meaning, value and significance of sport including its privileged position in society, or what we refer to as “sporting exceptionalism”; (2) a brief overview of a case study that illustrates the challenges facing the global business of sport; and, (3) a framework for conceptualising alternative futures in the global business of sport, drawing on examples from women's sport.

Why French Academic Journals are Protesting

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 375-386
Author(s):  
_ _ ◽  
Camille Noûs
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Student Teacher ◽  
Employee Benefits ◽  
Academic Journals ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Administrative Reforms ◽  
Academic Labor ◽  
The World ◽  
The University

Abstract Written by an anonymous collective of academics as well as an alliance of academic journals on strike, “Why French Academic Journals are Protesting” firstly operates as an archive of struggles unfolding in the world and on the future of research and higher education in France. Documenting a wave of transformations, from the bureaucratization of student-teacher relations and the commodification of university diplomas to the contractualisation of academic labor and cuts to employee benefits, the article exposes the loss of autonomisation and the diffusion of precarity in French academia. More than merely chronicling devastating legislative and administrative reforms, it acts as a testament of a unique form of scholarly disobedience or scholar-activism. In doing so, the author-activists open up a space of hope for alternative futures or perhaps even a sanctuary, wherein the university-as-it-were might be salvaged from or imagined beyond neoliberalism.

A Future in Ruins

KronoScope ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 190-211
Author(s):  
Jilt Jorritsma
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Mexico City ◽  
Alternative Futures ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Sustainable Futures ◽  
Present World

Abstract Around the world, the rise of temperatures due to global warming is revealing and exposing forgotten traces of the past that are still scored somewhere in the physical terrain. This paper suggests that the transformative landscapes of the Anthropocene not only confront our present world with a ruined and unprecedented future; they also draw our attention to suppressed and stowed-away memories and geographies from the past. By examining imaginaries of sustainable futures in Mexico City, New York and Amsterdam, it will be shown that site-specific ruins and traces of past realities have an evocative potential: they are used to imagine alternative historical trajectories and indicate possible alternative futures that challenge the absoluteness of our present world. The underlying temporality in these imaginaries is one in which the future is portended as a return of a past: there lies a future in these ruins.

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