Tag: anticipation

Hear

Storylistening FuturePod Episode

Sarah and Claire joined FuturePod host Peter Hayward for an episode of this long-running and insightful podcast series. We talk about storylistening, with a particular focus on its relevance to futures practitioners and academics, and others concerned with anticipation. The episode covers how we met and started working together (and each of our interests in Futures), the main arguments of the book (including the framework of the four-fold functions of stories), with a particular focus on communicating the insights of Chapter 4 – Anticipation, including the historical and present relationship between Futures Studies and science fiction. The episode webpage contains a full transcript which can be searched for keywords, and a list of the works we mention along the way in the conversation.

Read

Thinking about the future is hard: what covid-19 taught about how to do it better

Claire wrote for the International Public Policy Observatory about how public decisions get made, and about how narrative models and narrative futures methods might help inform them. “Jane Austen’s novels vividly model aspects of middle-class life in her lifetime but do not directly model much about colonialism; an epidemiological model shows disease outcomes but not educational ones, and so on. The model has to be simple to be useful, but if it’s useful then there is a risk that its users rely on it too much and pay insufficient attention to the other important parts of the world which the model must ignore in order to function. This gap applies both to computational models, with their compelling charts and numbers; and to narrative models, with their seductive detail and rhetoric.”

Academic

Decolonising the Future

Art by Joshua Mays @joshuamaysart on Instagram

In April, Sarah presented material on decolonising the future, climate change, and N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy from Chapter 4 of Storylistening at an academic conference: the annual meeting of the British Society for Literature and Science. Her talk was part of a panel on Literature, Science and Policy, with presentations also given by Professor Genevieve Liveley, on narratology and cyber security policy, and by Lt Col David Calder, on science fiction’s critical utility in a military context. You can listen to the presentation here: