About the Book
As the uncertainty of global and local contexts continues to amplify, the Routledge Handbook for Creative Futures responds to the increasing urgency for reimagining futures beyond dystopias and utopias. It features essays that explore the challenges of how to think about compelling futures, what these better futures might be like, and what personal and collective practices are emerging that support the creation of more desirable futures.
The handbook aims to find a sweet spot somewhere between despair and naïve optimism, neither shying away from the massive socio-environmental planetary challenges currently facing humanity nor offering simplistic feel-good solutions. Instead, it offers ways forward—whether entirely new perspectives or Indigenous and Traditional Knowledge perspectives that have been marginalized within modernity—and shares potential transformative practices. The volume contains contributions from established and emerging scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners with diverse backgrounds and experiences: a mix of Indigenous, Black, Asian, and White/Caucasian contributors, including women, men, and trans people from around the world, in places such as Kenya, India, US, Canada, and Switzerland, among many others. Chapters explore critical concepts alongside personal and collective practices for creating desirable futures at the individual, community, organizational, and societal levels.
This scholarly and accessible book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of leadership studies, social innovation, community and organizational development, policy studies, futures studies, cultural studies, sociology, and management studies. It will also appeal to educators, practitioners, professionals, and policymakers oriented toward activating creative potential for life-affirming futures for all.
Table of Contents:
Introduction to The Handbook for Creative Futures PART I: Context for Creative Futures 1. Why Creative Futures? 2. Postnormal Imagination with Ziauddin Sardar 3. Humanity’s Great Creativity Reset: Designing Worlds Beyond the Grand Global Futures Challenges 4. The Systems View of Life: A Science for Sustainable Living 5. An Optimistic Future of Consciousness 6. Social Construction and the Forming of Futures PART II: New Orientations and Reframings for Creative Futures 7. Making Sanctuary with Báyò Akómoláfé 8. Creating the Future: Five Principles of Realistic Hope 9. Post-Oppositional Tactics for Transformation 10. Societies of the Possible 11. Inhabiting Brilliance: Wrestling the Gifts of Narcissism 12. The Wisdom of Holding Old Stories in New Ways: Intentionally Evolving Towards a More Inclusive and Creative Future 13. Postnormal Creativity 14. Queer Convivial Futures 15. Accessing the Future through Imagination PART III: Reckoning with the Past and Present for Creative Futures 16. Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures with Vanessa Andreotti 17. Healing Historical Traumas: Empathic Dialogue in Creation of Better Futures 18. Creative Futures Begin with Reckoning with an Unjust Pasts 19. Entangled Landscapes: Healing as a Path to Sustaining Food Futures 20. ‘Reinventing’ the Past to Imagine Better Futures PART IV: Frameworks, Approaches, and Applications for Creative Futures 21. Creating Equitable Societies: Four Cornerstones 22. Setting Course for an Ecological Civilization 23. Beyond and Through Covid-19: Possible Pivots to Different Futures 24. Universal Basic Income for Creative Futures 25. Transformation Catalysts, Narrative, and Art: Shaping New Potential for System Transformation 26. A Transdisciplinary Analysis of Creativity within Fridays for Future School Strikes: Or ‘Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain' 27. Recasting the Future with Amazon Workers 28. Creative Futures Conspiracies: A Matrix and Some Maxims for Radical Social Re-imagination 29. The Future of the Past: Memory and Social Change following the COVID-19 Pandemic 30. Imagineering ‘Mission-Oriented Branding’: When Shifting from Fragmentation to Integration Seems Mission Impossible 31. Sourced from Love: Pathways Toward Cultural Healing PART V: Personal, Relational and Collaborative Practices for Creative Futures 32. Creating Compelling Futures with Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown 33. Taking a Radical Stance for Complex Joy in the Work of Shaping Change 34. The Use of Transformative Somatic Practices in Processes of Collective Imagination and Collaborative Future-Shaping 35. Awareness-Based Collective Creativity: A Studio-Based Practice for Social Future-Making 36. Psychological Futures: Antifragility and the Imperative of Interdependence 37. A World with Space for All to Be: Generative Mindfulness, Awareness-Based Action Research, and Inclusion
About the Author :
Gabrielle Donnelly is a writer, educator, and scholar-practitioner. Her work focuses on bridging social change theories and practices to support leaders and communities to engage with the complex issues of the times and create more compelling futures. Gabrielle is an Associate Professor at Acadia University (Mi’kma’ki/Nova Scotia, Canada) and a Lead Strategist at The Outside, a global consultancy activating large-scale equitable change. She is a consulting editor of World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research.
Alfonso Montuori is an educator, musician, and consultant. He is a Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies and has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Fine Arts at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and in the Department of Psychology at the “Sapienza” University of Rome, and also taught at the Central South University in Hunan, China in the mid-80s. Alfonso is the author of several books and numerous articles on the future, creativity, complexity, leadership and education. He is co-editor of World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research
Review :
“Is this book relevant and useful or possibly just of interest to scholars, students and practitioners of tourism and hospitality? It is almost certain to be of interest to anyone who thinks and worries about the future. I will venture an opinion that it is more valuable because it provides content that can be applied to and enlighten the thinking and writing of tourism scholars…. Would I have my institution’s library acquire the book for the use of students and faculty. The answer is a resounding “yes”. But in addition, would I actually purchase the book myself? Again, the answer is a resounding “yes”. Surely, this is the ultimate positive assessment of a book.”
Michael Conlin, Okanagan College, Canada; an excerpt from a review in Journal of Tourism Futures
"This fascinating volume contains important contributions that initiate the process of weaning us away from the overly-instrumental and exploitative modernist mindset we have inadvertently acquired through the imperative of economic progress. This mindset has become, as Alfred North Whitehead observed, as natural as the air we breathe; it is so translucent, and so pervading, and so seemingly necessary that we are often unaware how fundamentally it shapes our perceptions, priorities and actions. It is time for us to reperceive and rethink our priorities and the contributors to this volume explore a variety of ways by which this can be realised. In this handbook, contributors explore these challenges and attempt to discover a "sweet spot" between despair and naïve optimism in addressing the massive socio-economic, political and "environmental planetary challenges" facing our time. The volume offers fresh perspectives that are more ecologically attuned but that have been surreptitiously marginalized by the onslaught of modernity and its imperatives. They importantly initiate the creation of new possible futures by exploring how to rethink the fundamental issues of our time."
Robert Chia , Research Professor of Management, Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, UK
"The Handbook for Creative Futures shows how glorious it is to be young now while old systems fail so that odysseys of phoenixes of their imagination and creation can rise from the ashes."
Jim Dator, Professor Emeritus and Former Director, Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA
"To paraphrase William Blake nearly 200 years later ‘we must co-create our futures, or be enslaved by another person's.’ This remarkable compendium of perspectives on the creative 'future potential of the present moment' reminds all of us to take our future seriously by consciously stepping into our agency of co-creating it. Life's core patterns are about creation, regeneration and transmutation (death and rebirth). If we aim to co-create wisely, we should keep this in mind as we collectively redesign the human impact on Earth from its current degenerative influence to re-align with our species inheritance and future as diverse regenerative cultures everywhere who are not only healers but creative expressions of the ecosystems they dwell in as custodians."
Daniel Christian Wahl, PhD Intl. Futures Forum, author of 'Designing Regenerative Cultures', Spain
"Once upon a time, talking about ‘the future’ brought about hope of inevitable progress. Not anymore. Despair is more easily discernible than hope. But it does not have to be that way, and this wonderful volume shows how - how to face reality head on and not lose faith in the ways it may be transformed. A diverse and brilliant array of authors discuss imaginatively how we may bring about creative futures. It couldn’t have been more timely or necessary. A fascinating volume."
Haridimos Tsoukas, The Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management, University of Cyprus, and Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organizational Behaviour, University of Warwick, UK
