Author Archive: Sohail Inayatullah

Global Transformations and World Futures (Book Info, 2009)

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Global Transformations and World Futures: Knowledge, Economy and Society, Vol 1 and 2 | Edited by Sohail Inayatullah | Oxford, EOLSS Publishers, 2009 | ISBN: 978–1–84826–666–7 (hard copy) | ISBN: 978–1–84826–216–4 (Adobe e-book Reader)

The overall structure of this Book is divided into three areas: (1) Global transformations in Knowledge: Social and Cultural issues. Issues such as the nature of global science, the challenge of building real communities in a virtual world, and the transition from an information economy to a communicative economy are explored. (2) The Global Economy. In this area, alternative definitions of globalization are developed – globalization as if the entire globe mattered – and the role of large players such as multinational are explored. Furthermore, globalization and development are linked, and the prospects for development in the South are evaluated. (3) World Futures. In this area, the theories and methods of the emerging discourse of Futures Studies are explored, particularly as applied to issues of gender and world futures; sustainable education; and, the futures of the United Nations.

The purpose for the development of this book has not changed over the past few years. Indeed, continued global transformation have made the analysis and articulate of world futures even more important. Most of the authors in this Book make the argument that humanity is at a juncture. While there are macro patterns that define what is possible in the next fifty or so years – trends in technology, structure of world power, for example – through human agency, transformations can be steered. Agency is possible and desirable. To discern how and where to influence the world system most wisely, maps of the future are required. My introductory chapter essentially maps the futures of humanity. The map has four dimensions. The first dimension is globalization. The second dimension is focused on foundational transformations in nature, truth, reality and Man. The third dimension develops scenarios of the future. These include the Globalized Artificial Society; the Communicative-Inclusive; The Continued Growth Business as Usual, and the Societal Collapse. The fourth dimension is an exploration of a preferred future – a post-globalization future.

Chapters:

  • Global transformations and world futures : knowledge, economy & society
  • Global transformations in knowledge : social and cultural issues
  • Global science
  • Non-Western science : mining civilizational knowledge
  • Global management of knowledge systems
  • Tranformations of information society
  • From the information era to the communicative era
  • Building “real” and “virtual” human communities in the 21st century
  • Navigating globalization through info-design, an alternative approach to understanding cyberculture
  • The global economy
  • Multinational corporations
  • Global movement of labor
  • The internet and political economy
  • Economics of transition
  • Global business ethics
  • Globalization as if the entire globe mattered : the situation of minority groups
  • Strategies to eradicate poverty : an integral approach to development
  • North-North, North-South, and South-South relations
  • World futures : trends and transformations in state, education and cultural ecology
  • Epistemology and methodology in the study of the future
  • The grand patterns of change and the future
  • Multilayered scenarios, the scientific method and global models
  • The futures of the United Nations and the world system
  • Globalization and information society-increasing complexity and potential chaos
  • Globalization, gender, and world futures
  • Neo-humanism, globalization, and world futures
  • Sustainable education : imperatives for a viable future
  • Financial resources policy and management : world economic order
  • International commodity policy : a new concept for sustainable development
  • Global sustainability : rhetoric and reality, analysis and action : the need for removal of a knowledge-apartheid world
  • Economic assistance to developing countries and sustainable world population
  • Capacity development and sustainable human development.

Access via publisher:

UNESCO in partnership with EOLSS [Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems]

 

Alternative Educational Futures: Pedagogies for Emerging Worlds (Book Info, 2008)

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Edited by Marcus Bussey, Sohail Inayatullah & Ivana Milojević

Sense Publishers, Rotterdam

Non-fiction/Academic | ISBN Paperback: 978-90-8790-511-8 | ISBN Hardcover: 9789087905125 | ISBN E-Book: 9789087905132 | 2008 | 324pp

Available from: www.sensepublishers.com

Alternative Educational Futures brings together theoretical and practical work in a challenge to mainstream thinking on the practice and purpose of education. The book promotes multiple futures by presenting works that range from the child-centred, through those that promote a futures oriented critical pedagogy to open ended explorations of the implications of technology for education and the possibilities of rethinking and deepening human potential.

The editors – Bussey, Inayatullah and Milojević – are all educators and describe this book as another small step towards rethinking the present in the light of possible futures. They see that whatever steps we take as a species towards the future – be it a proto-global civilization, a fractal cosmopolitanism, a gaian-technolopoly, or a return to the past – education both as an institution and as a social process is key to how we get there, remembering that the future is created and changes with every step we take.

The book contains chapters on futures strategies, tools and techniques for a range of educational contexts, global education and neohumanism, the futures of universities, the changing shape of textual authority and learning in the face of the internet, access and equity, democracy and learning, Buddhist and Vedantic insights and offering on education, Steiner education, creative pedagogies and a number of case studies on the successes and failures of futures studies in a range of educational and institutional contexts.

Along with chapters by the editors, there are contributions from David Hicks, Jim Dator, Erica McWilliams and Shane Dawson, Patricia Kelly, Julie Matthews, Robert Hattam, Kathleen Kesson, Basil Savitsky, Jennifer Gidley, Gary Hampson, Richard Slaughter, Martin Haigh and Billy Matheson.

All authors in this collection are committed to transformation of assumptions about education and its social function. These chapters bare witness to various manifestations of an emerging global mind set that is marked not by coherence and a single story but by multiple and layered possibility. The authors all see, from often quite different positions, that the future health of society lies in diversity and a social activism that is grounded in the local actions of individuals. Education will play a central role in empowering this activism and it is to this multiple future that this book turns its attention.

Reviews and Comments

Comments on Alternative Educational Futures: Pedagogies for Emergent Worlds

We desperately need the dynamic revolution in education that this book offers us, reflecting the new ways of thinking and being on this planet that will permit us to live in peace as a global family even through massive climate changes. Read it and put these ideas into practice as quickly as possible in any ways you can!  

Elisabet Sahtouris

Evolutionary biologist and futurist

Author of EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution

We have more than enough books that under-estimate what is called for where educational change is needed, that only rearrange deck chairs on the deck of the Titanic. This edited book goes where change must go and its case for alternative pedagogies is exhilarating. Drawing on 18 wide-ranging new essays the editors both challenge conventional educational analysis and forge beyond it to explore a deeper transformative potential of self and culture. The book promotes visions, rather than roadmaps, and pioneers thereby a fresh agenda for a new type of lifelong schooling that honours spirituality, sustainability, and empowerment. Bold, eclectic, and original, it leaves a reader eager to get on with a major overhaul of education, from birth throughout life, the better to replace the dominant enervating education narrative with one that soars. Distinctive and revealing, the book will reward a close reading by all eager to help education finally achieve what has always been possible, but needed the creative jumpstart this book offers.

Arthur B. Shostak

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

Drexel University
Author of Anticipate the School You Want: Futurizing K-12 Education

This collection provides an insightful, panoramic view of this precarious moment in the history of humankind. These uncommonly perceptive essays consider the "range of alternative futures" before us and describe how we might work and educate toward a future that offers more humane, nourishing, and genuinely sustainable ways of living. These are stirring, provocative, exciting writings that explore the most vital questions of our time.

Dr. Ron Miller

Holistic education theorist

Editor of Education Revolution magazine.

Alternative Educational Futures is a daring attempt to break out of the endless cycle of school/university reform. This volume offers a rare combination of imagination and rigor, pointing towards the possibility that what is happening in the world around us today is the end of education and the rebirth of learning.

Dr. Riel Miller

UNESCO

Fasten your seatbelts before you enter this collection of provocative, sometimes brilliant, essays, because it will take you at warp speed on a journey to many places you have not conceived of before, places where your past understandings and current beliefs may be shaken up. Basing their work on theory, imaginative thinking, empirical social research, or case studies, the authors map, create, explore, and evaluate alternative futures for education, from grade schools to universities and beyond. Every educator—indeed every citizen—ought to read this book as an inspiration and guide to making teaching and learning more effective, appropriate, equitable, and flexible in a rapidly changing world.

Wendell Bell

Professor Emeritus

Yale University

Author of Foundations of Futures Studies Volumes 1 & 2

Alternative Educational Futures challenges mechanistic models of curriculum and pedagogy predicated on linear thinking, control and predictability. Both individually and collectively, the editors and contributing authors generate multifaceted understandings of futures in and for education that are open, recursive, organic and emergent. This is a text that performs what it represents by questioning its assumptions, permitting contradictions, tolerating ambiguities, and resisting the pernicious and pervasive politics of complexity reduction in education and society. These adventures in thinking should be an invaluable resource – and source of inspiration – for all who care about the quality of education for immanent yet unpredictable futures.

Noel Gough

Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education

Director, Centre for Excellence in Outdoor and Environmental Education

President, Australian Association for Research in Education

 

 

Using the Future to Explore Visions of Globalization (2008)

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By Sohail Inayatullah

This essay reviews globalization and its alternative futures. It does this drawing from the epistemological and methodological focus of futures studies. Thus the futures is visited in a disciplined fashion the hope of moving away from idiosyncratic “how I see the future” discourses. This means seeing the future not only in temporal space as forward time, that is, we are unable to remember the future, as we can the past, but to see the future as an asset, a resource.

Australia 2026 – An Alternative Future (2007)

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Sohail Inayatullah, Professor, Graduate Institute of Futures Studies, Tamkang University; adjunct Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast.

www.metafuture.org

 

Drawing inspiration from the recent Australian Association for Environmental Education conference, this essay paints a different possible scenario for the future of Australia.

It has been almost twelve years since the Howard-Costello run was dramatically defeated. Australians, while enjoying economic rise, tired of the social and environmental divide that followed. The Liberal party had been great at economic growth within the industrial paradigm but the digital era demanded far more flexibility and creativity than a 1950s childhood could give leaders.

Since the new leadership – a coalition of new labour, Green and recently created political parties – there have been dramatic changes.

Some have been visible changes, one can see while walking around in cities, others have been systemic changes, but the major shift has been one of worldview – from the politics of fear and exclusion to the ethics of inclusion and a version of sustainability. As well, the story Australians told about themselves had changed – it was not about “children overboard” or “interest rate hikes” but about the confident but ethical Aussie, certainly punching above one’s weight but not boasting about it. On the contrary, more and more Aussies took a personal pride in quietly , working with other cultures to meet the global challenges.

Of course, the obvious happened. Australia signed Kyoto, the Prime Minister apologized to indigenous communities, a republic was created. And: the first Australian president was aboriginal, providing (as with Nelson Mandela in South Africa), moral leadership and direction.

The rise of cultural creatives – a mere five per cent of the population a generation ago but now almost 30 per cent has been the driver of change. Their values of ecology, spirituality, gender partnership, concern for future generations and globalism (freedom of movement of culture, ideas, labour and capital but protection of local communities) have had dramatic impacts throughout the world. They were central in the dramatic rise of a culture of engaged caring.

But there were many other changes. The first time home buyers grant was increased. However, part the deal was a stipulation that the house purchased with the grant used green technologies – rain water tanks, solar energy, to begin with. This was not so difficult as state level building associations throughout Australia had already agreed to lift their standards ensuring that all houses were designed with sustainable, cradle-to-cradle principles.

Universities received dramatic improvements in their budgets. However, they were not exempt from structural change – they too had to dismantle the worst of the industrial era – i.e.STEEP hierarchy, with the professor above, the lecturer below and other staff and students way below. Universities were regeared to meet the challenges of aging, sustainability, and the dramatic revolution in nano-, genetic- and digital technologies.

Internationally, the image of the arrogant Aussie, the deputy Sheriff had disappeared. Australia was now regarded as a unique mix of British, European, indigenous and Asian cultures. Multiculturalism has become stronger but it too has been challenged. Culture is not used as an excuse for gender or nature discrimination. Australian’s many cultural traditions are fine with this as they have been given their dignity – with strength negotiation is possible. Muslim communities have continued to play a vital role, as with all migrant communities, but as Australian has become more gentle, so have they – the eclectic mystical sufi dimension taking its rightful place among the many other strands of Islam.

But while grand debates of culture continue to take place throughout the world, the small things are what really matter. For example, day care centres are fully funded – indeed, salaries of day care workers have jumped. Schools too have changed – they are fully digital, far more flexible toward the unique talents of individual learners – the one-size-fits-all model has been thrown out. Children co-manage schools, design curricula with adults. Peer to peer mediation is used to resolve conflicts. Education truly is for sustainability. Research from brain science – the many ways we learn – and from meditation (enhancing our capacity to learn and think) has been integrated into schools.

Cities too have changed – from being a nation of faceless suburbs, the healthy cities movement has ensured that community-work hubs, walk and bike ways have become the norm in Australia. There are real travel choices – cars, light rail, bus, bikes. Buses as well are far less mass based – they smell better, allow for individuality, arrive and leave on time and are linked to other transport modes, that is, they are integrated, tailored, efficient and seamless transport.

Demand for local food production has seen the return of the backyard veggie patch and urban community gardens. Around the gardens people have rebuilt their local neighbourhood, with a resultant dramatic decline in urban crime.

Better travel choices have dramatically helped reduce the obesity crisis, as has a change in diet. The rise of the vegetarian movement, with consequent savings on water, savings on energy, savings on health and longer life, has also played an important part in reshaping Australian values and behaviour. As with tobacco consumption, meat consumption continues to decline. Organic food production continues to soar in Australia.

The health sector has been reconfigured to be multi-door – doctors work with other allied health professionals, not just to treat patients but also to advise them and to empower them. “Take charge of your health, or she won’t be right” is the catch cry. With Australians living longer, active aging and grey power have been important movements, ensuring that the latter years of life are happy and productive ones.

Australia did not become the nuclear super power as Howard had hoped. Iinstead massive funding for green energy has made Australia a hotbed of creativity – every Asian city is learning from Australia’s systemic changes and its green technologies. As with the Kennedy’s image of a “man on the moon”, the new leadership vision of clean, green, trans-cultural communities has sparked a wave of innovative technologies. Businesses are doing well, especially those that are based on triple bottom line performance measures. Along with businesses, cooperatives have boomed as legal changes have allowed them to grow and become a dominant feature of the organizational landscape.

The Howard-Costello years, while somewhat of a dark era socially, are seen as an example of what can happen when leadership dishonestly pretends to have no ideology; when it leads from fear instead of possibility; and when it focuses on the short term instead of the long term. Of course, many remember that era with fondness – there was less ambiguity, less debate – but generally, while Howard was seen as a great manager and an astute politician, it was increasingly recognised that he was not a great leader who enabled citizens to be better than themselves.

There are endless problems today as well:

  • Sea-level rise is still likely to change the coastal areas,
  • challenges of peacekeeping still challenge governments throughout the world,
  • there are new health crisis as individuals adapt to a post-industrial world and
  • new infectious diseases are rampant because of global warming …

Nonetheless, but humility and dignity have ensured that innovation and creativity are here to stay.

Or perhaps not!

What if it is now 2026 and Prime Minister Howard remains on top? What if he has managed to coopt new ideas while not watering down his core conservative ideology? His exercise regime, anti-aging genetic breakthroughs and new brain drugs could have helped him keep up abreast of all these issues. Costello may be still waiting for him to resign, with the rest of us wondering how things could have been so, so different.

Which future do you wish for?