The futures of futures studies
Pushing the boundaries of futures thinking
27 October 2023 (Friday), -, ONLINE

On Regenerative Anticipation

The Museum of Tomorrow, in partnership with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, now hosts the first Unesco Chair in Futures Literacy in Brazil. The Chair addresses what we call “regenerative anticipation” as a necessary process for a global shift towards planetary wellbeing. Interestingly, both anticipation and regeneration are terms with a biological origin and with complementary meanings. Regeneration refers to the capacity of organisms and entire systems to self-reform. Anticipation is also related to repair and, ultimately, to wellbeing. Both are properties of every living being – human and non-human. Regeneration, as we approach it, is about healing the modern fractures between humans and between humans and non-human elements of nature. Our premise is that to anticipate this kind of regenerative processes involves constructing dialogues between times, spaces and beings. Thus, we are interested in interspecies relationships across a variety of spaces (urban, rural, forests), within a timeframe that we approach as ‘duration’ (sensu Henri Bergson). We attempt to link past, present and future in ‘one time’ by addressing: 1) “ancestral futures”: by dialoguing with Amerindian and Afrobrazilian cultures as to how they use the future to address the present; 2) “seeds of the good Anthropocene” (sensu Bennett et al.): by surveying present-day cases of collective wellbeing; and c) “futures of futures”: by investigating and building dialogues with post-development worldviews. This talk will provide an in-depth conceptual perspective on regenerative anticipation and provide real life cases and practices.

Chairholder of the Unesco Chair in Futures Literacy
Museu do Amanhã
Professor
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro