About CoFutures Literacy

At CoFutures, we believe everyone should have the knowledge and tools to build their own future. At Learn.CoFutures, our CoFutures Literacy platform, we offer our tools, including courses on speculative fiction and futures thinking, a media library with our interviews, books and handbooks, as well as other research materials. And we offer these tools completely free of cost.

Why CoFutures Literacy

A central bias haunts our knowledge and awareness of planetary futures. Most of the futures that are marketed and sold as planetary futures, as well as related futures methodologies and knowledge, are futures designed within the Global North, and are thus limited in their applicability, suitability, and relevance for the problems and challenges of our time. This bias means that the vast majority of voices and imaginaries of the futures from the rest of the world, i.e. futures from most of the world are ignored, sidelined, and elided in discussions within futures thinking. This bias is the result of ignorance, lack of research, availability of data, and also often enough political or methodological will to engage with the complexity of the world as it is, from the bottom up, including its infrastructures of imagination that make futures possible. The bias pervades design, economic and social policy, politics, strategy, foresight, and disciplines that overly rely on “signals” and “trends” from the richer parts of the world.

At the same time, futures thinking and foresight are a business proposition all by themselves, offered as solutions in a world that is on the brink of complete collapse. Courses as well as training programs in futures and foresight are often sold for hundreds to thousands of dollars, and create mystified spheres of knowledge and practice. Such “knowledge” and “methodologies” often also align with corporate interests to shape the world, and sold by futures consultancies under licenses of exclusivity, making that which should readily be an open resource for everyone the privilege of the few. 

The complexity of the world requires a different approach. CoFutures Literacy, born out of the original research, philosophies, methods, and paradigms developed by CoFutures is a unique approach to this problem. We believe first and foremost in the power of storytelling: storytelling that builds futures from the margins. Storytelling has carried us through all historical periods, and we exist in and through the stories we tell. It is through our stories we imagine and first carve our futures.

In our research, we thus conducted extensive video interviews with storytellers: writers, artists, creatives, and community organizers, to learn about their key practices, their activities and goals, their specific response to local-global challenges, and their solutions and visions for better worlds. We travelled five continents, from South America to Southern and Eastern Asia, from Africa to the Middle East, to map the space of future imaginaries.

We also conducted numerous workshops with a wide range of stakeholders around the world, including transnational organizations, artists, corporations, think tanks, museums, academics, and scientists to create and refine a set of techniques based on our research. These techniques are the heart of our specific methodology. They can be used for designing, developing, and maintaining a bottom up approach to futures thinking. 

Finally we rendered our analysis and our work into different courses, lectures and materials that can be used to practice and teach these techniques, as well as build new worlds and possible futures. We even enlisted experts to build a completely free speculative fiction writing course, which can teach the different steps of the entire process, beginning with the concept and idea and building a full story and even move on to publishing, to enable the storytellers of tomorrow to bring their worlds to life.

This is the CoFutures revolution.