Participatory Futures: Past, Present, and Futures

CALL FOR SUB-EDITORS

An Invitation to Shape a Landmark Work in Futures Studies

Series Editors: John Sweeney & Jose Ramos

A Book for This Moment

We are living through an unprecedented crisis of the social imagination. Across the globe, the images people hold of the future have been colonised by dystopian media cycles, algorithmic anxiety, and the slow suffocation of ‘used futures’ — inherited scripts that no longer serve, yet persist for want of alternatives. The very capacity of communities, publics, and civilisations to imagine otherwise appears to be atrophying at the precise moment when it is most needed.

Into this breach steps participatory futures (PF): the most powerful methodological repertoire available for engaging the public in the co-creation of new social imaginaries. PF is not a workshop technique. It is a theory and practice of civilisational renewal — a creative twinning of public engagement and futures thinking that intervenes, at the deepest possible level, in how communities and societies see, sense, and inhabit their own futures.

If Fred Polak is right — that the rise and fall of civilisations can be read in the vitality of their images of the future — then the task before us is not merely methodological. It is civilisational.

This book is a response to that challenge. Participatory Futures: Past, Present, and Futures is the first major edited volume to chart the full arc of participatory futures — from its intellectual roots in the mid-twentieth century through to its emergent horizons in the decades to come. It is being written now because it needs to exist now.

We are inviting five outstanding scholar-practitioners to join us as section-editors, each shaping one of the book’s five open sections. This is a call to those who see the urgency — and the possibility.

The Book: A Conceptual Introduction

The Imagination of the Future as Terrain

At the heart of this book is a foundational claim: the imagination of the future is not a secondary or epiphenomenal dimension of social life. It is a terrain — a substance, a medium, a field of force — that shapes human action every bit as concretely as economics, politics, or ecology. Futures imaginaries organise expectations, order perception, and provide the invisible architecture of collective decision-making. They are at once intersubjective and anticipatory; politically dangerous and politically indispensable.

The book maps this terrain across four interlocking strata, each offering a lens through which participatory futures practice can be understood, deepened, and transformed.

Stratum I — The Unconscious Stratum

Langer · Foucault · Castoriadis · Inayatullah (CLA)

Beneath the stories we tell about the future lies an unseen dimension of meaning: the generative and constraining social unconscious that shapes what can and cannot be imagined. Susanne Langer’s analysis of cinema as a dream world, Foucault’s episteme, and Castoriadis’s radical imaginary all gesture toward this depth. Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis, through its myth and metaphor layer, offers practical tools for surfacing and intervening here. PF, at its most radical, operates at this stratum — not just asking what futures people want, but illuminating the deep structures that determine what futures they believe are possible.

Stratum II — The Narrative Stratum

Polak · Anderson · Jameson

The futures we inhabit are, above all, stories. Fred Polak’s Image of the Future established the foundational premise: civilisations rise on the strength of their positive images of the future and decline when those images collapse. Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities and Fredric Jameson’s political unconscious extend this insight — showing how shared narratives create the social bonds and blind spots that constitute collective life. Participatory futures works at this stratum by helping communities not only critique the narratives they have inherited but actively construct new ones.

Stratum III — The Latent/Emergent Stratum

Bloch · Cosmo-local imagination

Ernst Bloch’s principle of hope insists that the present always contains latent potentialities — concrete utopias waiting to be drawn forward. This stratum attends to the critical divergences, differences, and mutations already stirring within existing social forms. It also engages a cosmo-local imaginary: the way that globalised flows of dreams, visions, and images are selectively adopted, localised, and hybridised — producing futures that are neither simply universal nor simply particular. PF’s role here is to hold space for emergence.

Stratum IV — The Agentic Stratum

Jungk · Governance Design and Anticipatory and Deliberative Democracy traditions

Robert Jungk’s Future Workshops established that ordinary people, given structured conditions for dialogue, could collectively critique the present and imagine profoundly different worlds. This agentic stratum is where PF is most recognisably itself: governance design, deliberative, democratic, participatory. It is where the future becomes, explicitly and unapologetically, a participatory project. This is the home terrain of the Nesta participatory futures framework — but the book insists that this stratum is only fully understood in relation to the three that precede it.

Embodied Temporality and Deep Time

One of PF’s most distinctive contributions is its understanding of embodied temporality. Time is not neutral. Different communities, age cohorts, and cultures inhabit time differently, and these differences are not superficial — they determine what kinds of futures engagement are even possible. A child’s sense of time is radically present-focused. The corporate planner inhabits quarterly cycles. The climate activist feels the urgent compression of a planetary emergency. The jazz musician knows time as something to be bent, stretched, and played.

PF, at its best, does not impose a single temporal frame. It meets people where their time-sense already is — and then works to expand it. The concept of deep time, as developed in geological and cosmological thinking, offers one such expansion: a temporal horizon that extends millennia into past and future, and within which the present appears not as an endpoint but as a waystation.

If participatory futures has a deep past — and this book argues that it does — then it also has deep futures. The book’s narrative arc moves in both directions simultaneously: recovering the founding moments of PF practice while projecting forward into the as-yet-unimagined possibilities of the field.

The Socio-Political Context: Used Futures and Collapsing Narratives

The book is explicitly situated in its historical moment. We live in a time of used futures — zombie imaginaries that continue to structure action and policy long after the conditions that generated them have passed. The neoliberal imaginary, the imaginary of endless growth, the imaginary of technological salvation: these are used futures, and their persistence forecloses the emergence of alternatives.

Compounding this is the dystopification of public imagination through algorithmically-curated social media. Where Fred Polak saw in the mid-twentieth century a dangerous weakening of positive images of the future, today we face something more acute: an active industrial machinery for the production and circulation of futures anxiety. The social imagination is not merely atrophied — it is, in many respects, under deliberate capture.

Public imagination is the battleground of the twenty-first century. Participatory futures is the most developed set of tools we have for contesting it.

The stakes could not be higher. If Polak was right that civilisational vitality depends on the quality and positivity of a society’s images of the future, then the participatory futures project is not a niche methodological concern. It is a civilisational intervention. This book makes that case — and invites contributors who are prepared to make it alongside us.

Structure of the Book

The book comprises seven sections, each of approximately 12,000 words, totalling a work of approximately 84,000 words. The sections are designed to be intellectually coherent as a whole while remaining distinct and individually significant. Two sections are already commissioned; five are open to proposals.

Section One — History (Commissioned)

Section-Editor: John Sweeney

This section excavates the intellectual genealogy of participatory futures. It traces the deep roots of PF practice — from the Enlightenment traditions of democratic participation and civic imagination, through the founding contributions of Jungk, Polak, and the early futures studies movement, to the emergence of structured participatory methodologies in the late twentieth century. The history section does not treat the past as prologue but as a living resource: a treasury of concepts, experiments, and insights that have not yet been fully claimed by the field.

Section Two — Theory (Commissioned)

Section-Editor: Jose Ramos

This section develops the theoretical architecture of the book. It elaborates the four strata of the social imaginary described above, advances the concept of embodied temporality as a foundation for PF practice, and makes the case for social imagination as both weapon and instrument of transformative change. It engages with the Nesta participatory futures framework — which understands PF not as a workshop format but as an expanding repertoire of modes and models of participation — and situates that framework within the broader intellectual landscape of futures studies, political theory, and cultural analysis. The theory section also develops the book’s core claim: that the imagination of the future is a terrain, a substance, a medium — and that intervening in it is the most consequential act available to futures practitioners.

Sections Three through Seven — Open to Proposals

Five sections remain open. Section-editors are invited to propose the direction, focus, and format of their section. Sections need not follow a conventional academic essay format — the book is explicitly designed for a folio/coffee table aesthetic, and visual, hybrid, and experimental formats are welcome alongside more traditional scholarly contributions.

The following are offered as indicative possibilities — not prescriptions. We are as interested in directions we have not imagined as in those we have:

• Practices and Methods: a systematic mapping of PF methodologies beyond the workshop — immersive, digital, embodied, speculative design, and community-led approaches
• Case Studies and Field Reports: rich accounts of PF projects, including the ‘disowned cases’ — the stories that organisations cannot or do not want to tell — that carry the most learning
• Equity, Decolonisation, and the Pluriverse: who gets to imagine the future? Whose imaginaries count? A critical examination of power, exclusion, and the cosmolocal dimensions of PF
• Children, Youth, and Intergenerational Futures: the radical temporal difference of younger participants and what it demands of PF practice
• Digital and AI-Mediated Futures: the intersection of PF with emerging technologies — including AI, immersive media, and social platforms — as both challenge and opportunity
• Futures of PF Itself: a speculative section on where participatory futures is going — its deep futures — drawing on contributions from emerging voices in the field
• Governance, Policy, and Institutional Contexts: PF in formal decision-making environments — parliaments, local government, international bodies — and what is gained and lost in translation

Section-editors are encouraged to think boldly about form as well as content. A section might include commissioned essays, curated practitioner reflections, visual documentation, interview fragments, conceptual diagrams, or speculative fiction alongside more conventional academic writing.

Roles and Responsibilities

What Section-Editors Are Being Asked to Do

Section-editors will take intellectual ownership of their section. This is not a contributor role — it is an editorial and curatorial role. Section-editors will:

• Develop and refine the conceptual framework for their section in dialogue with the series editors
• Commission or write the content of their section (approximately 12,000 words), which may include multiple contributors or a single extended essay
• Manage the peer review process for their section using the OJS (Open Journal Systems) referee management platform, which will make refereeing transparent and efficient
• Conduct timely and rigorous refereeing of contributions within their section, and where relevant, contribute to refereeing in other sections
• Engage in the collective editorial process of the book as a whole, attending editorial meetings and contributing to shared decisions about coherence, tone, and design
• Deliver a final, publication-ready section manuscript on the agreed timeline

What Section-Editors Will Receive

• Named Section-editor credit on the cover and in all promotional materials
• Full editorial involvement in a landmark work in the participatory futures field
• Engagement with a global network of PF scholars and practitioners
• A share in royalties from book sales, proportional to contribution (details to be agreed)
• A complimentary copy of the published book

Indicative Timeline

• Expressions of interest: six weeks from this call
• Sub-editor selection and confirmation: eight weeks from this call
• Section outlines due: three months from confirmation
• Draft sections due: nine months from confirmation
• Peer review completed: twelve months from confirmation
• Final manuscripts due: fifteen months from confirmation
• Publication via Ingram Spark: eighteen months from confirmation

Production and Design

The book is designed to be beautiful as well as intellectually rigorous. We are producing a work that carries the aesthetic weight of its subject matter — a folio or coffee table book feel, with generous white space, carefully selected open-access and Creative Commons imagery, and a design sensibility that honours both the scholarship and the visual imagination that participatory futures embodies.

The book will be self-published through Ingram Spark, ensuring wide distribution through major retail and library channels globally. All imagery will be sourced from open-access or no-copyright collections — contributors are invited to suggest images that speak to their section’s themes.

The OJS platform will be used throughout the editorial process to manage peer review, correspondence, and version control, ensuring that the process is as transparent and efficient as the book’s subject matter demands.

How to Submit an Expression of Interest

We are seeking section-editors who bring a combination of scholarly depth, practical experience in futures and/or participatory work, and genuine enthusiasm for the book’s vision. We particularly welcome proposals from practitioners and scholars who are working at the edges of the field — in contexts, communities, or methodological traditions not yet well represented in the PF literature.

Your Expression of Interest Should Include:

• A brief biographical statement (200–300 words) describing your background and your relationship to participatory futures
• A section proposal (400–800 words) setting out: the focus and argument of your proposed section; the key themes, concepts, or cases it would engage; the format(s) you envisage (essay, multiple contributors, hybrid, visual, etc.); and why this section matters to the book as a whole
• An indicative list of three to five contributors you might commission (if relevant), with a sentence on each
• A statement of your capacity to meet the timeline described above

Expressions of interest should be done here:

Informal enquiries are welcome and may be directed to Jose Ramos or John Sweeney at [email…]. We are happy to speak with prospective sub-editors before they submit a formal expression of interest.

We are not simply producing a book. We are producing the next image of the future for a field that exists to make such images possible. We want collaborators who understand what that means.

We look forward to hearing from you.

John Sweeney & Jose Ramos

Series Editors, Participatory Futures: Past, Present, and Futures