Future Narratives Research Articles

It’s a battlefield! A thematic analysis of narratives shared in Cape Town emergency departments

BackgroundThe Emergency Department(ED) team need to make sense of an ever-changing dynamic environment. The stories people tell about everyday occurrences are central to how sense-making occurs. These stories also contribute...

Utopian Science Fiction and Ethnic Future Imagination in Chinese Contemporary Science Fiction

Utopian science fiction, as a fusion of science fiction literature and utopian literature, integrates the construction of imagined interactions between people, technology, society, and the environment in future narratives. In doing so, it deepens the aesthetic value and social significance of science fiction literature. Chinese science fiction utopian future narratives use technological imagination to construct three models of expression. First, they re-examine the symbiotic patterns of technology, humanity, and time within the multiple dimensions of human subjectivity. Second, within the transformation of social structures, they reassess the subject and emotions, recognizing that the acceleration of social change has transformed human nostalgia into a series of rehearsals seeking future possibilities in the past. Third, within the dissolution of cultural politics, they reconsider space and the environment, reconstructing planetary existence through a model of deterritorialization. The imagined technological developments constitute the internal logic of Chinese science fiction utopian future narratives, suggesting that the future is an uncertain movement entangled with technology, time, space, and human nature. The confluence of technology, time, and humanity gives rise to people’s expectations and yearnings for eternal life. However, these three modes of narrating the future also lead us to return to Earth as the central theme, highlighting the planetary nature and reflecting on the meaning of existence.

Future Narratives in Contemporary Fiction and Film: Challenging the Multiplicity of Alternative Possible Worlds

Future Narratives in Contemporary Fiction and Film: Challenging the Multiplicity of Alternative Possible Worlds

UNDERSTANDING IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION OF INDONESIAN EFL TEACHER EDUCATORS FROM A THREE-DIMENSIONAL NARRATIVE

Research into language teacher identity construction has proliferated in recent years. However, studies examining identity construction from an integral perspective of EFL teacher educators’ past, present, and future narratives seem sparse. To fill this lacuna, the present study was designed to explore five Indonesian EFL teacher educators’ identity construction from their past, present, and future narratives. This study’s data were generated through multiple life-historical interviews with the five participants. The thematic analysis showcased that language teacher identity is constructed as a continuum from the teachers’ past experiences as EFL learners, present experiences as lecturers and doctoral students, and future narratives as imagined teacher educators. The findings also revealed that the participating teachers constructed their language teacher identity through complex and context-dependent experiences in their past, present, and future narratives. Based on the study’s findings, we offer a novel approach to studying language teacher identity construction employing teachers’ three-dimensional narratives. This approach enables teachers to understand themselves and their relationships with social environments through the interconnectivity of their past, present, and future narratives.

Situational awareness across different temporalities: scenario exercises for health, security and energy futures

ABSTRACT This article looks at the concept of situational awareness in the context of scenario planning. It draws on three cases in which scenarios are used – scenario-based Turning Point exercises in Israel, which focus on security and emergency situations; health scenarios and simulations conducted by the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe; and energy scenarios in the World Energy Council – and examines the different ways in which situational awareness is manifested in these scenarios. In WHO scenarios, situational awareness is initially intricately connected to specific details of the situation described in the scenario, triggering a predefined model for reporting and responding to health crises. In Turning Point scenarios, however, the use of situational awareness not only activates a predetermined response but also encourages critical thinking about the broader context of the event and the important questions and challenges that arise from it. In the WEC scenarios, situational awareness is directed towards potential future changes and developments by creating rich narratives of plausible futures that enable engagement with the future. The analysis shows that the particular temporality of the context in which the scenario technology is used affects the way in which situational awareness is manifested in each case.

Dialectic Perspective on Interpersonal Conflict of Pre-Divorce and Its Reconciliation

This research examines the Dialectic Perspective of Interpersonal Conflict of Pre-Divorce and Its Reconciliation. The development of the divorce rate in Indonesia has reached its peak in 2022 compared to the last six years. These phenomena interest the researcher in discovering how the married couple in dispute can resolve their marriage and repair their relationship. This research is based on the theory of relational dialectics as a ground theory, supported by narrative sense-making as the middle theory, and complemented by dialogic listening theory as the applied theory for supporting conflict resolution. The method used was a qualitative descriptive approach to study the case of four informants with criteria determined by the researcher. The results of this study indicate a framework dimension from the precursor of marriage conflict, namely individual character and family character, forward to the process of the conflict where the dimension of interpersonal conflict and addressing or problem-solving of the conflict is found, to the reconciliation dimension that contributes to the success of reconciliation such as time, agreement, use of future narrative, satisfaction, financial performance, habitual interdependence, and religion and cultural constraints.

Discursive Construction of Hong Kong’s Future Beyond 2047: A Press Media-Based Study

This study explores the public discourse about Hong Kong’s future beyond 2047 through the lens of local press media during the first half of the “unchanged 50 years” since the handover. The data contains a number of 187 newspaper articles centered on the issue of 2047, extracted from 16 local news outlets in Chinese. Using qualitative and quantitative methods of content analysis, the study observes the development of media discourse over a long span of time and points out people’s major concerns about Hong Kong’s long-term future. It distinguishes three major discourses in terms of identity construction and modes of anticipation, and explores the links between future-oriented suggestions and real-world actions. As part of an ongoing research on Hong Kong’s future narratives, this study contributes to the research on social mentality during the first half of the “one country and two systems” and explores how the future is imagined and built through discursive practices.

Between evidence first and political fight – understanding dynamics of (de-)politicization in US climate movements’ future narratives

ABSTRACT Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise Movement are among the new climate movements that have come into the public spotlight since 2019. While their successes in agenda-setting are undisputed, conclusions vary on whether and how this re-politicizes climate discourses. This article presents a new framework to analyze the dynamics of (de-)politicization along the dimensions of vision, agency and process. Based on a narrative analysis, we compare US movement and media documents from 2019 and identify five key narratives, namely, ‘Evidence First,’ ‘Intergenerational Divide,’ ‘Climate Justice & Intersectionality,’ ‘System Change’ and ‘Political Fight.’ While all movements use politicizing notions, we find that tensions between the dimensions inhibit the articulation of alternative visions of the future. This overall depoliticizing tendency appears to be rooted in process understandings that originate in dominant discursive framings of climate change and of science–policy interfaces – a finding that is informative for climate discourses in general.

City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures ed. by Barbara Buchenau (review)

City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures ed. by Barbara Buchenau (review)

Climate futures and development pathways: A journey from terrorism to tourism in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan

Achieving equitable development that supports climate mitigation in an uncertain future remains a daunting task, particularly for post-conflict societies. In this paper, we present results from a local stakeholder participatory scenario workshop investigating emerging priorities for anticipatory action, with respect to future climate impacts, in the vulnerable conflict-affected Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. Importantly, our findings reveal that stakeholders were less focused on addressing climate impacts, and more interested in local development initiatives to enhance tourism offerings and the regional national park network. The novelty of our work lies in the use of participatory scenarios to both initiate a process of healing and provide a forum for the co-production of future narratives focused on sustainable and inclusive development. However, this first involves mending the social fabric that ties individuals and communities together in an inclusive and informed way. As such, our work adds to the scholarship of environmental peacebuilding, creating a local context-specific knowledge base using a bottom-up approach to understand a shared future. The case study presented here highlights the perspectives of policymakers from the global south and brings local stakeholders together in a space where top-down management approaches often dominate.

Alternative policy narratives of the future of climate change: Analyzing Finland's energy and climate strategy and news reports

AbstractIn this article, we examine the ways in which the futures of climate change and the climate change policy process are constructed as narratives—both explicitly and implicitly—in two different yet interconnected contexts that shape public climate discourse and debate: foresight‐based political decision‐making and journalism. The featured case is the National Energy and Climate Strategy of Finland for 2030. We employ and expand the Narrative Policy Framework to better understand the co‐existent, implicit narratives of the future in the contexts of policy and media. We construct two co‐existing yet contradictory underlying narratives of the future of climate change and climate policy. Our approach reveals that the prevailing master narrative of a desirable future is challenged by a co‐existing counter narrative where policies in the energy and climate strategy prioritize shorter‐term policy interests over climate change. Building on these findings, we argue that, in climate policy communication, communicators convey futures through narratives—both explicitly, as descriptions of what is perceived, hoped, and anticipated to happen, and implicitly, as the sum of the parts included and excluded.

HOW CAN WE ADVANCE THE FIELD OF GERONTOLOGY BY LEVERAGING OUR LIVED EXPERIENCES AS GERONTOLOGISTS AND GERIATRICIANS?

Abstract Reflecting on my development as a professor of gerontology has become a normative part of my mid-life career. Through this reflection, I have identified 4 stages of career progression, none of which were planned nor anticipated. I have labeled the stages: 1. Content and Logistics; 2. Confidence and Innovation; 3. Generativity and Meaning; and 4. Being the Other. This last stage, which I presently float in and out of, has made me very aware that my teaching about aging has intersected with my personal aging and unexpectedly, has shaped my personal pedagogy in profound ways--increased empathy, sensitivity, and social awareness. I am living the subject matter I thought I intimately knew. I am the other. Has my teaching been inauthentic? Hypocritical? Ageist? Aging and ageism are now personal. Others have written about this mental transition or awakening (Brody, 2010; Cohen et al., 2022; Greenberg, 2022; Pruchno, 2017; Scheidt, 2017), but very little scholarship has been directed towards this phenomenon. O’Neill (2016) also brings attention to this shares, “Although geriatric medicine is widely perceived as an advocate for older people, it is striking how little scholarship has been directed towards the attitudes and personal beliefs of geriatricians toward ageing and, in particular, towards their own future narratives.” This presentation will draw from the existing literature to frame this emergent 4th stage of career progression and begin the discussion about how this insight can be leveraged to advance the fields of gerontology/geriatrics and teach the next generation of scholars.

Living Labs and Future Narratives

Authenticity, originality, lived human experience. How much value is being placed on these qualities in a world facing challenges such as AI, climate change and economic breakdown, rapid reconfigurations in the future of work? How can cross curriculum experiences and partnership pedagogies support students and universities navigating these challenges? In this paper, I reflect on innovations in learning and teaching, research, and scholarship in an age of seismic uncertainty. Specifically, I address the intersections between Screen Media, STEM, design thinking and storytelling for sustainability as part of the student and university experience. Citing case studies and examples, I consider some of the co-creation methodologies, the role of appreciative enquiry, and cross-curriculum partnership pedagogies, in the form of living labs. These have demonstrably enabled us to learn from each other and contribute to a wider landscape of scholarship and work that values original thinking and authentic creative expression.

Addressing SDG16.2: Eliminating violence towards children – An applied theatre approach

We offer a case study of a long-running Aotearoa New Zealand-based applied theatre programme, Everyday Theatre. As both academics and Everyday Theatre practitioners, we explore how the programme addresses the aspirations of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.2, which is centred on eliminating violence towards children. Our reflections are informed by the qualitative data collected in our ongoing discussions as facilitators, our reflective journals, teacher evaluations of the programme, and a series of collaborative research workshops. We investigate the role and place of the drama conventions of teacher-in-role, pre-text, aesthetics, and framing. They are potent constituents of participatory theatre practice that can provoke both students and teachers to collaboratively conceptualise themselves and each other as active, responsible, critical, and empathetic agents for social change. These explorations throw light on how applied theatre practice can form small but significant contributions to engendering opportunities for students and teachers to consider how they could change their own future narratives, creating more socially cohesive local communities, and, in this way, addressing SDG 16.2. Cover image: photo by WOKANDAPIX on Pixabay

Contemporary Graphic Narratives of the End: Sketching an Ecopolitics of Disorientation and Solidarity through Sf Bande Dessinée

This article focuses on visions of the end in contemporary science fiction bande dessinée to explore the combined potentialities of the sf genre and the comics medium for imaginaries of world-rebuilding in the Anthropocene, and to develop an ecopolitics of disorientation and solidarity for a collapsing world. Bringing an ecocritical approach to queer and feminist theorizations of the politics of disorientation, it first discusses texts that draw (counter-)narratives of Anthropocenic futures, in which other-than-human agencies, spatialities and temporalities take centre stage in unsettling ways and collapse Western master narratives of the environment. In Jérémy Perrodeau’s Crépuscule, the non-linear storylines of an artificially created and now contaminated planet collide and assemble to disrupt the myth of a ‘virgin land’, rendering the erasure and slow re-inscription of genocidal and ecocidal violence. In Enki Bilal’s trilogy Coup de sang, it is the illusory hyper-separation of humans from nature that is dismantled through post-apocalyptic elemental graphics. The article then explores ways in which disorientation becomes fully productive as part of an ecopolitics when it is entwined with solidarity, a term that here extends beyond the human and is understood as a praxis of both care and resistance, drawing on ecofeminism and environmental philosophy. This is explored through Ludovic Debeurme’s trilogy Epiphania, which critiques and dissolves the human-animal boundary into enmeshed relationalities in sf visions toward multispecies communities and bodily and ethical mutations; and Jeanne Burgart Goutal and Aurore Chapon’s ReSisters, a choral narrative that makes use of comics’ potential for diffractive and participatory readings to draw the outlines of an ecofeminist uprising.

Proud fathers and fossil fuels: gendered identities and climate obstruction

ABSTRACT While the disproportionate power of corporate and state fossil fuel interests to influence energy and climate policy is now well known, questions remain about the groups that enthusiastically consume such narratives, with far-reaching political consequences. Fossil fuel workers are one such group. Their positions within these debates are highly relevant to policy outcomes, yet their political positions are often assumed to oppose decarbonizing the economy to the detriment of otherwise well-intended interventions. We offer a more nuanced understanding of the sentiments of fossil fuel workers invoked through their public and political engagements. We use the Twitter profiles of 160 self-identified oil and gas workers to explore the nature of oil workers’ masculinity and its implication in climate obstruction and far-right politics. We advocate for engaging workers in the energy transition through meaningful collaboration with workers to build trust and investment in a shared future narrative.

Speculative Political Ecologies: (re)imagining urban futures of climate extremes

What role can a speculative political ecology play in (re)imaging urban futures of climate extremes? In recent years, narratives of dystopian futures of climate extremes have proliferated in geosciences, and across the media and creative arts. These anxiety-fueled narratives often generate a sense of resignation and unavoidability, which contributes to foreclosing the possibility of radically different political projects. In this article, we argue that these narratives conceal the coproduction of nature and society and treat nature as the problem, thereby locking futures into dystopic configurations. Political ecology scholarship can contribute to generate a politics of possibility by reconceptualizing the relations that constitute urban futures under climate extremes as socionatural. This, we argue, calls for a more experimental political ecology and new forms of theorizing. To this aim, we develop a speculative political ecological approach grounded on a numerical model that examines the potential of transformative change in the aftermath of extreme flood events in a capitalist city. Analytically, this opens a unique possibility of exploring urban futures beyond current trajectories, and how these alternative futures might transform vulnerability and inequality across urban spaces. From a policy perspective, we lay the foundations for a new generation of models that apprehend the role of power and agency in shaping uneven urban futures of climate extremes.

Return to normalcy: Transition and futures in insecure spaces

Returning to normalcy or a scene of stability is always a political goal for the states battling the scene of continuous violent conflicts. Yet, the notion of normalcy can be a mirage or future promise when violent conflicts appear unfinished, or resolution appears permanently incomplete. This article argues that normalcy is not just a political goal but also a governance strategy in conflict-torn spaces. As a governance strategy, normalcy absorbs the narratives of a better future, thereby enabling actors and institutions to coevolve, transform and coordinate themselves to achieve specific versions of stabilisation. With respect to the armed conflicts in the Lake Chad Basin region, the article finds that Nigeria state’s declaration of return to normalcy enacts and transforms uncertainty and contingency into practical challenges and opportunities, impacting civilians’ temporal and practical orientation but also play a crucial role in the process of adaptation to evolving security threats in the frontlines. Normalcy, thus, unfolds as future-making, open and inevitable but also actionable, enacting collective and self-organised strategies to the state’s transition policy and visions in insecure spaces. This article reflects on the fact that institutionally generated future always plays out as collective and official visions driving transition narratives and subjects in conflict-torn spaces.

Global indicators and AI policy: Metrics, policy scripts, and narratives

AbstractArtificial intelligence (AI) has become a global policy issue that is actively governed by international actors producing governance indicators. This article argues that despite the arguments about disruptions to governance and policy due to AI, the global rankings increasingly constitute a strong path dependence on AI policy, leading to conformity with existing policies and institutional practices of economic competitiveness. By analyzing the composition and data sources of global indices in competitiveness, innovation, human capital, and artificial intelligence, I will show how the global rankings now evolve by sharing data and concepts. Consequently, these metrics and related policy scripts promote the seeming continuity of current activities of global competitiveness. AI is discussed as a “revolution” but framed as a matter of “competitiveness,” “openness,” and “talent competition,” implying standard perceptions of economic competitiveness and innovation. There is also a narrative element in the policy script, as the future policies on AI are promoted with references to history that also project the past into the future. My article concludes that while path‐dependent policy indicators and related future narratives give a sense of orientation, they are problematic as they portray a seeming continuity of activities in times of disruptions, delimiting policy alternatives such as AI ethics.

Bringing the Nature Futures Framework to life: creating a set of illustrative narratives of nature futures.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11625-023-01316-1.