Publications
CLA2.0: Transformative Research in Theory and Practice
Edited by Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic
The authors use CLA to investigate topics such as: The Global Financial Crisis, terrorism futures, global governance, ageing and the changing workforce, educational and university futures, climate change, water futures in the Muslim world, the alternative futures of China, agricultural policy in Australia, and the new national narrative in Singapore.
Causal layered analysis, the editors conclude, can be used not just to deconstruct the future but to reconstruct the future, to create whole-of-worldview and narrative solutions to the complex problems humanity faces.
This volume will be useful to theoreticians and practitioners who seek to use the future to change the present.
Questioning the Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation
Edited by Sohail Inayatullah
Questioning the Future is a significant contribution to the future studies literature and usefully makes available Inayatullah’s key works, both theoretical and practical. It will therefore be of enormous value to both students and practitioners alike.
-Richard Slaughter, President World Futures Studies Federation, Foundation Professor of Foresight, Australia Foresight Institute
An excellent resource.
-Michael Harkin, Queensland Catholic Education
Questioning the Future is a significant contribution to the future studies literature and usefully makes available Inayatullah’s key works, both theoretical and practical. It will therefore be of enormous value to both students and practitioners alike.
-Richard Slaughter, President World Futures Studies Federation, Foundation Professor of Foresight, Australia Foresight Institute
An excellent resource.
-Michael Harkin, Queensland Catholic Education
Questioning the Future represents a new synthesis in futures thinking. Bringing into futures studies disciplines such as action research, futures generations research, organizational development, critical theory, civilisational studies, macro-history and complexity science, Inayatullah is inclusive of the many traditions, the many patterns, and the dynamic holism emerging in the futures field. This book is at the cross-roads where new pathways to alternative futures will be created in the 21st century.
-Jose M. Ramos, Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia
Questioning the Future gives organizations and individuals a step by step guide in assisting them create alternative futures the 21st century is demanding. Sohail Inayatullah has taken the major futures methodologies, including his own such as causal layered analysis, and put them into one book that is a must for all strategists, CEOs and senior executives in both the public and private sectors.
-Robert Burke, Program Director; Mt Eliza centre for Executive Education, Melbourne Business School
This book outlines the discipline of future studies with uncommon clarity. Inayatullah’s careful explanations of the skills necessary for the craft makes Questioning the Future an essential reference for both students and practitioners.
-Laurence Brown, Senior Researcher, Social & Behavioural Sciences, University of Queensland
After facilitating strategic planning within Queensland State and the Local Governments for several years, reading Questioning the Future has significantly opened my mind, images and thoughts as to how shallow existing strategic planning processes are, and why they fail to deliver. Inayatullah’s approaches provide deep insight into methodologies that can truly transform individuals, processes and futures. This book is essential to those individuals and organizations who want to make a difference and create alternative destinies.
-Steve Gould, Maroochy Shire Council
Neohumanist Educational Futures: Liberating the Pedagogical Intellect
Edited by Sohail Inayatullah, Marcus Bussey and Ivana Milojevic
Neohumanist Educational Futures breaks new ground by linking neohumanism (the expansion of humanism to include nature and deep spirituality) with pedagogy and futures thinking.
Inayatullah, Bussey and Milojevic, all educators, theorize the ethics of inclusion and exclusion; situate neohumanism in Tantric and transcultural futures; map out issues in neohumanist pedagogy (including, education for world futures, from information to wisdom, social cohesion in South Africa, speciesism and vegetarian pedagogy in Sweden, alternative indicators for neohumanism, integrated intelligence, peace and non-violence, partnership education, and the politics of historiography) and provide case studies of neohumanist educational practice. Interspersed throughout this text are short pieces by Indian mystic and author, P.R. Sarkar, Gurukul Vice-Chancelor, Shumbushivananda, and an interview with Paulo Freire conducted by social activist Maheshvarananda.
Along with Inayatullah, Bussey, and Milojevic, contributing authors include Vedaprajinananda Avadhuta, Tobin Hart, Marcus Anthony, Riana Eisler, Marlene de Beer, Helena Pederson, Vachel Miller, Peter Hayward, Joseph Voros, and Mahajyoti Glassman. The authors argue that the current paradigm of
uni- and multi-culturalism have reached their limits; a new approach, as in neohumanism or transcultural and transcendental sustainability, is required for humanity to move forward and, while doing so, include those that have been pushed aside.
To create this alternative future, a new educational philosophy and practice is required; one that inspires but does not become yet another method to be tamed and imitated.
Neohumanism intends to awaken the intellect from its narrow boundaries (nationalist, religious) toward planetary spirituality. Education in this future would be holistic–physical, mental and spiritual; ecologically and technologically driven, global and local in its orientation, and person based, meeting the changing evolutionary and developmental needs of each child and adult, teacher and student-learner.
BOOK REVIEWS:
If our planetary future is to embody anything other than a global commodity culture with recurrent technological, political, environmental, military and social crises, then consciousness itself, and the acts of thought that flow from it, must shift radically. Education is a crucial component of any such “paradigm", yet current educational discourse is almost exclusively concerned with test scores, bureaucratic accountability, the standardization of knowledge, and the preparation of students for the global economy. In this arid landscape, Neohumanist Educational Futures offers a deep breath of invigorating intellectual air. These essays, synthesising ancient and postmodern understandings of compelling depth and richness, constitute a ‘wisdom-centered’ paradigm of educational thought and practice that might turn us away from the looming dystopian future toward a dynamic new ethical era of peace, sustainability, social justice, and the cultivation of human potential.
-Dr. Kathleen Kesson, Professor of Urban Childhood Education at the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, and author (with Jim Henderson) of Curriculum Wisdom: Educational Decisions in Democratic Societies
Futures Thinking for Social Foresight
by Richard A. Slaughter with Marcus Bussey
A social system does not move smoothly from one state of its culture to another…Something must come apart in order for something new to come together. But for individuals within the system, there is no clear grasp of the next stable state-only a clear picture of the one to be lost. Hence the coming apart carries uncertainty and anguish since it puts at risk the basis for self-identify that the system had provided.
-Donald Schon, Beyond the Stable State, Temple Smith, 1971
The real problem is not exterior…(but)…interior. The real problem is how to get people to internally transform from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric consciousness, which is the only stance that can grasp the global dimensions of the problem in the first place, and thus the only stance that can freely…embrace global solutions.
-Ken Willber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, Shambhala, 1995
By adding a future dimension to the learning process, we help to provide direction, purpose and greater meaning to whatever is being studied. By integrating past, present and future, we act to strengthen a neglected link in the learning process.
-Robert Fitch and Cordell Svengalis, Futures Unlimited: Teaching About Worlds to Come, Washington, 1979
Futures concepts and curriculum seem to me to be the most important rising paradigm in education. It addresses much of the ambivalence of post-modernism and focuses on pro-active strategies that attend to the imperatives facing our world.
-Paul Inglis, QUT, 2001
There has been a widespread failure to promote positive images and reference points, which young people can identify as points of attraction or optimism with regard to their futures.
-Open Mind Research Group, Melbourne, 1995
The most important insight that follows from contemplation of the…levels of being (is that–at the human level, there is no discernable limit or ceiling.
