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Crises are major events or periods faced by individuals, groups and society. This paper aims to explore the value of facilitating (un)learning in and from crises. Educators have a key role in building futures literacy (FL) for dealing with uncertainties, understanding emergence and responding to rapid, complex change. Integrating crisis learning as part of FL is important for enhanced anticipatory and crisis responses.

Adapting from causal layered analysis (CLA) methodology, experimental virtual futures workshops were designed and hosted during the coronavirus pandemic. Participants discussed COVID-19 crisis responses and imagined the “new normal”. Sessions explored mindsets applied to make sense and derive meaning from the crisis, myriad ways of adapting to uncertainty, as well as lenses used to imagine post-crisis futures.

In the exploratory and participatory CLA exercises, participants shared on the COVID-19 pandemic and imagined post-crisis futures. Related hopes and fears concerned self, collectives and nature. Overall, despite the dramatic nature of crises, opportunities exist for learning and transformation. Educators play a central role in heightening awareness about the dynamics and nature of crises, and integrating crisis learning into FL, as important and transformative capabilities.

In exploratory dialogues, the “new normal” was applied as a frame for uncertainty. The workshops were hosted during the COVID-19 pandemic as a specific type of crisis. The workshop design is intended to be replicable in various crisis contexts and for iterative rounds with diverse groups. Therefore, futures images exemplify context-specific crisis-time sentiments. The findings presented here do not aim to be generalizable. They are liable to change across different crises, as a crisis evolves and across diverse stakeholders.

Dramatic change and crisis events offer potential moments for development, advancement and transformation. Educators have an important role in facilitating (un)learning in and from crises, elevating FL and expanding futures consciousness. The CLA methodology can assist educators to engage with multiple facets, layers and dimensions of crises. By considering crises intently, educators can help in anticipating emergence, imagining and preparing for diverse alternatives.

The contemporary world is volatile, complex and ambiguous volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA), as revealed by multiple crises. Crises can spotlight new possibilities and horizons and may be possible turning points. The COVID-19 is an example of a crisis disruption, which provoked thinking and contributed to action about novel prospects. To realise transformative change however, it is important to integrate crisis learning as part of FL, and here educators are an important influence.

Integrating crisis learning into FL is proposed to improve responses to the rapid pace of change and uncertainty as well as to boost crisis preparedness. As part of this, there is value in applying and developing techniques such as CLA that help explore and question assumptions, to understand diverse, possible and transformed futures. This way, we can explore, imagine and expand new horizons.

The purpose of this paper is to provoke reflections on the potential contribution of food tourism experiences to achieving the sustainable development goals for eradicating hunger and malnutrition.

In line with the creative analytic practice in scientific inquiry, this study develops and discusses a futuristic scenario inspired by a factual company. The case is based on ideas derived from studies on educational and food tourism and entrepreneurship, more precisely ecopreneurship.

Food tourism can offer an opportunity for discussing food challenges in the context of ideas and projects to alleviate hunger and malnutrition. This study shows that imagining such possibilities and projects is challenging because of the complexity of the issue.

This study suggests that despite some limitations, educational food tourism experiences might go well beyond the issues of regional development, localism and authenticity. Practitioners, including tourism entrepreneurs and private and public food and tourism organisations, might be essential to exploring alternative food tourism futures in ways that truly contribute to urgent global challenges.

The value of this paper lies in the use of a scenario to imagine and to reflect on the future of food tourism in relation to the global challenges of hunger and malnutrition. The paper suggests that the ideas from tourism studies and ecopreneurship can offer interesting perspectives on future developments in the sector.

The aims and pedagogies in the field of science education are evolving because of global sustainability crises. School science is increasingly concerned with responsible agency and value-based transformation. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to argue that perspectives and methods from the field of futures studies are needed to meet the new transformative aims of science education for sustainable development.

This paper analyses some contemporary challenges in science education and gives reasons for introducing a futures perspective into science classrooms. The suggestion is illustrated by reviewing some results, published elsewhere, on future-oriented activities trialled within the European Union project “I SEE” and students’ experiences on them.

Recent research has shown that future-oriented science learning activities, involving systems thinking, scenario development and backcasting, can let students broaden their futures perceptions, imagine alternatives and navigate uncertainty. Practising futures thinking in the context of contemporary science offers synergies through shared perspectives on uncertainty, probabilities and creative thinking.

This paper highlights the relevance of the futures field for science education. Future-oriented activities appear as promising tools in science education for fostering sustainability, agency and change. Yet, further work is needed to integrate futures aspects into science curricula. To that end, the paper calls for collaboration between the fields of futures studies and science education.

The retail sector is not largely studied in Italy. The study offers a comparison between youth retail shift work in Milan and London. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the one hand on youth work and on the other hand to the debate on agency and structural factors in life planning, representation of the future and the transition to adulthood, observed in the United Kingdom's and Italian labour market. Even if the second one is a Southern European Country, these contexts are both characterised by a service-oriented economy and the widespread of precarious and flexible jobs.

Qualitative methods were used: one year of ethnographic observation, 50 interviews and two focus groups were carried out between 2015 and 2018 with retail workers and trade unionists. The contexts are Corso Buenos Aires in Milan, Italy, and Oxford Street in London, United Kingdom. Analysing young workers' discourses, the author identifies narratives that allow to grasp their present agency and imagined future.

Observing the crisis of the narrative (Sennett, 2020) allows to highlight the social consequences of working times on young workers' everyday life and future. The author argues that young workers struggle with the narrative of their present everyday life and the representation of the future. This relates to the condition of time alienation due to the flexible schedules and the fast pace of work in retail, both affecting the work-life balance.

The social consequences of flexible schedules in retail and fast fashion sector, which are new issues not yet sufficiently explored, are here investigated from the perspective of young workers. The study is focussed on the representations of young people working with customers in social and economic contexts characterised by flexible schedules and the deregulation of shop openings, the so-called 24/7 service society, not largely investigated in the sociological scientific literature, above all in the Italian context.

This conceptual paper explores the possibility to envision circular regenerative processes embracing agrowth and placemaking within tourism; an industry remarkably connected to the Anthropocene and its detrimental impacts on the planet. Drawing on theorisations of circular economy, on the concept of agrowth, and on theories of placemaking, this viewpoint offers a novel conceptual framework to imagine a regenerative future for tourism.

The authors connect the ancient archetype of “circularity”, largely used to make sense of life on Earth, with the Greek concept of oikonomia. The resulting notion of a circular oikonomia is then intersected with theories of placemaking. In doing so, the authors are driven by the idea of de-growth, as an “a-growthism” urging the abandonment of the faith towards growth for an enduring stable regenerative agrowth.

The authors offer a novel conceptual framework to counteract the negative impacts of Anthropocene and envision future scenarios in which tourism can make a difference by enacting enduring regenerative processes for places and human and non-human entities.

The originality of this study lies in the conceptual framework proposed to imagine the future of tourism, hospitality and mobilities in circular regenerative terms. This study envisions stable and enduring regenerative processes of natural assets, materials, products, services and resources as well as a tourism space made up of lively, multiple, transformative relationships and interactions among people and the environments people live in and travel to.

This paper explores practices of foresight within the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) program Futures Literacy, as a form of transnational governmentality–founded on the interests of “using the future” by “emancipating” the minds of humanity.

The paper draws on ethnographic material gathered over five years within the industry of futures consultancy, including UNESCO and its network of self-recognized futurists. The material consists of written sources, participant observation in on-site and digital events and workshops, and interviews.

Building on Foucault's (1991) concept of governmentality, which refers to the governing of governing and how subjects politically come into being, this paper critically examines the UNESCO Futures Literacy program by answering questions on ontology, deontology, technology and utopia. It shows how the underlying rationale of the Futures Literacy program departs from an ontological premise of anticipation as a fundamental capacity of biological life, constituting an ethical substance that can be worked on and self-controlled. This rationale speaks to the mandate of UNESCO, to foster peace in our minds, but also to the governing of governing at the individual level.

In the intersection between the growing literature on anticipation and research concerning governmentality the paper adds ethnographically based knowledge to the field of transnational governance. Earlier ethnographic studies of UNESCO have mostly focused upon its role for cultural heritage, or more broadly neoliberal forms of governing.

Future is rarely explicitly addressed or problematized in business network research. This study aims to examine the possibilities of developing a business actor’s future orientation to network studies and imports ideas and concepts from futures research to support the development.

The study is conceptual and interdisciplinary. The authors critically analyze how extant studies grounded in the sensemaking view and process research approach integrate future time and how theoretical myopia hinders the adoption of a future orientation.

The prevailing future perspective is restricted to managers’ perceptions and actions at present, ignoring the anticipation and exploration of alternative longer-term futures. Future time is generally conceived as embedded in managers’ cognitive processes or is seen as part of the ongoing interaction, where the time horizon to the future is not noticed or is at best short.

To enable a forward-looking perspective, researchers should move the focus from expectation building in business interaction to purposeful preparation of alternative future(s) and from the view of seeing future as enacted in the present to envisioning of both near-term and more distant futures.

This study addresses the growing need of business actors to anticipate future developments in the rapidly changing market conditions and to innovate and change business practices to save the planet for future generations.

This study elaborates on actors’ future orientation to business markets and networks, proposes the integration of network research concepts with concepts from futures studies and poses new types of research questions for future research.

Although management scholars have embraced grand challenges research, in many cases, grand challenges have been treated as merely a context for exploring extant theoretical perspectives. By comparison, our approach – robust action – provides a novel theoretical framework for tackling grand challenges. In this invited article, we revisit our 2015 model, clarifying and elaborating its key elements and taking stock of subsequent developments. We then identify three promising directions for future research: scaffolding, future imaginaries, and distributed actorhood. Ultimately, our core message is remarkably simple: robust action strategies – participatory architecture, multivocal inscription and distributed experimentation – jointly provide a means for tackling grand challenges that is well matched to their complexities, uncertainties, and evaluativities.

This viewpoint paper aims to explore the past, present and future of travel visas granting permission to travel. Visa restrictions are used by governments as an efficient method of restricting access in advance of travel. This paper explores how this may change in the future resulting in a shift of power from tourist to destination.

The Futures Triangle method was used to create a scenario incorporating the three dimensions of the triangle, i.e. the pulls of the future, the pushes of the present and the weights of the past. An artefact of the future was created to help visualise this future.

This analysis suggests that the role of visas may change in the future such that visa regimes may become part of a destination strategy. A future scenario is postulated in which destinations demand proof of fit with the destination strategy before granting a visa.

This viewpoint paper develops an artefact of the future based on the changing role of travel visas. It suggests that tourists might need to market themselves to the destination, proving that they are a good destination fit, before they are granted a visa to travel.

Scholars and practitioners generally acknowledge the crucial importance of visions in motivating and inspiring organizational change. In this article, we describe a two-part activity based on visionary leadership scholarship and theory designed to teach students to cultivate foresight and consider future possibilities through the organizational vision statement development process.

Using an experiential design, the exercise draws on several empirically validated techniques to encourage foresight and future thinking, to help students place themselves in the shoes of the chief executive officer of a hypothetical organization and use dramaturgical character development strategies to craft the vision statements that they will champion.

The exercise has been used in three different business courses (N = 87) and has been well received.

The content of the exercise is adaptable to a variety of courses in which leadership and vision are focal topics – such as organizational behavior, strategy and leadership – and could also be modified for an online classroom setting.