The future of Futures Studies: a utopian tale

Contrary to the field’s most entrenched methodological strictures, the title of this chapter is in the singular (The Future of Futures Studies) and not in the plural (The Futures of Futures Studies). The reason is patent: I am not going to explore a variety of possible futures. Instead, I shall focus on a selected normative future for the social and human sciences. Admittedly, and for many different reasons, the future I am going to describe may be taken as widely implausible. Whence the chapter’s subtitle. Reference to utopias as multiply implausible realizations is a hollow understanding of utopias though. More interesting and closer to my intended meaning is reading utopias as “the sense-making process internal to decision-making that is able to keep it open” (Poli, 2019).