Tulevaisuudentutkimuksen kv. journaalin 'World Future Review' Call for Papers

 

Sage Publishers recently acquired the WFR from the World Future Society. I have agreed to become editor-in-chief.

 

Sage and I intend WFR to be THE source for information about Futures Studies as an academic and consulting discipline. When people want to know about what Futures Studies is, we want them to turn to WFR.

 

That is, what will distinguish WFR from other futures journals is that (as a rule) it will not have articles about “the future” or “the futures of x”, but rather about futures studies as an academic and consulting discipline – the roots of futures studies, its present state, the preferred futures for futures studies itself.

 

Sage Publishing is very firmly committed to futures studies and their newly-acquired journal. They want WFR to succeed and futures studies to mature, and believe this the way to do both.

 

I would like to invite you to submit an article along those lines – what FS is, and what you think it should be. 

 

I am especially interested in anything that states what you see are, or should be, the intellectual roots of futures studies, not only in terms of other futurists, but more generally: what scholars, schools of though, ideologies, social theories, methods, underlay what the early futurists thought and wrote? What now? What should underlie them?

 

What assumptions do we make about “time”? “Where” is the future? What is the role of human agency vs. other forces (such as technology, for example) in shaping the futures. Your thoughts on the role of language in shaping our ideas about futures (as Bae Ilhan has done about East Asian languages vs. English/French futures studies, for example). 

 

Do we need to divide futures into “on the horizon” – short-run future – and “over the horizon” – long-term futures. That division seems important to many consulting futurist and their clients, who prefer short horizons, while there is still a need for the longer-range work from both a theoretical/epistemological point of view, and a practical, consulting point of view.

 

These are the sorts of issues I ask you to focus on. Not on “the future” in general, nor on the future of some particular place or institution, but on futures studies itself, as an academic discipline and as a practical, consulting activity.

 

Because I just took over the job, and there are no manuscripts waiting to be published, I urgently need material for the December 2015 issue of WFR. I cannot give you a deadline for that. As soon as we have enough good material we will proceed with publication.

 

But of course there are then four issues per year of WFR to be published, and I have no manuscripts in hand now for any of them either, so I am happy for material from you for later whenever you have something ready.

Articles should not normally exceed 6,000 words. Reference citations should be numbered in sequence, and placed after main text beginning on a separate page. Follow the Chicago Manual of Style regarding orthography and word usage.

 

All manuscripts submitted should be Microsoft Word files. Illustrations, pictures and graphs should be supplied with a resolution of at least 300 dpi. Please note that color images will be published in color online and black and white in print (unless otherwise arranged); therefore, it is important that you supply images that are legible in black and white.