Abstract
I am very happy that Aubrey Yee, co-editor of the World Future Review, is able to introduce herself to you all in this issue. I think you can see why I feel so fortunate having her as a colleague on this venture, as she has been on some others done through the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies. Her editorial well-captures the positive, enthusiastic, visionary, and yet very hard-working ethos she brings to her life (and family: she has two young children and a stellar husband).
This issue exemplifies one of the features we hope the newly focused World Future Review (WFR) will continue to display—a commentary on ideas about the futures that appear in futures journals. In this instance, Richard Slaughter, a distinguished futurist of very wide experience, comments on some of the themes characteristic of—or missing in—the equally distinguished futures journal, foresight. We welcome other contributions, including commentaries on the past, present, and futures of WFR itself.
Ted Gordon is one of the founding fathers of futures studies, going back at least to pioneering work in the young RAND corporation in the 1960s where he carried out many studies using the Delphi method that helped invent, develop, and popularize that method within the futures community. Here he discusses a new twist on scanning, an essential method for most futurists.
As anyone on any of the several listservs and blogs devoted to futures studies knows, Victor Motti, from Iran, is one of the most knowledgeable and wide-ranging younger futurists active now. His paper here is a significant contribution to literature in the futures field. It explains the depth and breadth of theory and data that professional, applied futurists might use in their thought and work, as he does in his.
As Aubrey Yee made clear in her editorial, futures studies is often a profoundly humanistic, political, and perhaps even dangerous enterprise. Jordi Serra explains the creation of futures studies in Catalonia as having its roots in the Franco Era when a group of women took action to preserve Catalonian art, literature, and language for the sake of future generations. The thriving cultures and people of Catalonia today stand as a living testimony to their brave work during what often seemed to be dark times of hopelessness.
One of the missions of WFR is to consider futures work going on outside of the self-conscious futures community, and to exchange ideas among disciplines on the study and utility of “the future” as an arena of scholarly and practical concern. Marcus Schulz, a well-known sociologist and specialist of social movements, shows the love–hate relationship many social movements have with the futures, given their intense focus on liberating themselves from the bonds of their history.
We hope that a regular feature of WFR will be self-critical autobiographies by futurists, young and old (in experience). We are honored to kick off this series with a self-portrait by Peter Bishop, founder and leader of one of the major academic programs on the future, at the University of Houston (Texas).