Futures Literacy, both the “discipline” and its form of diffusion (Futures Literacy Labs) depend on an almost exclusive lexicon in English. Calls for provincializing Futures Literacy (Facer and Sriprakash 2021; Bisht 2020) are in harmony with the context we explore in this paper, in which we want to show that, for a more effective diffusion of this capacity, there is a need to detach and unpack such an exclusive and excluding vocabulary, so that local ways of understanding and ‘using’ the future can influence not only these local contexts but to inform the discipline of anticipation itself.
Our work uses material collected from different FL laboratories carried out with native speakers of Portuguese in its Brazilian variant. The objective of collecting this data is the creation of a lexicon in Portuguese for the communication and dissemination of this ability. In this article, we analyze the heuristic process of creating this lexicon and how the choice of terms for the translation of words into English helps us to better understand this capacity and, moreover, contribute to the development of its theoretical apparatus thanks to the exploratory nature of the activity.