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Paper short abstract

While certainly successful in organizational terms, UNESCO’s Futures Literacy programme has been criticized for advancing a badly masked “modernization” agenda. Using bibliometric methods, this paper explores whether and, if yes, to which degree the criticisms of can be empirically grounded.

Paper long abstract

Futures Literacy has been launched by UNESCO as a global project of social empowerment. Pioneered by Riel Miller (2006, 2018) and now widely implemented in education policies both at national and international levels, futures literacy nonetheless has also been subject to criticism. Critics renounced the positioning of UNESCO (and its predominantly Western experts) as benevolent actor bringing new knowledge to “underdeveloped” areas. This resonates with recent STS research on recent discourses surrounding the proliferation of new technology, in particular Ruha Benjamin’s (2019) analyses of the New Jim Code governing the implementation of AI based categorization software.

In search for empirical data supporting or refuting this criticism, this paper inspects the published scientific literature with scientometric methods to assess how much of this literature is written by scholars with non-Western affiliations. It relates its findings to the results of earlier studies that used similar methods (Dayé 2025) to discuss whether and if yes, to which degree the published literature on futures literacy has incorporated the debates on decolonization that have characterized the larger discipline of future studies (e.g., Sardar 1993).

References

Benjamin, Ruha. 2019. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.

Dayé, Christian. 2025, Futures Thinking: Epistemic Tribes and Territories. Palgrave Macmillan.

Miller, Riel. 2006. From Trends to Futures Literacy: Reclaiming the Future. Victoria: Center for Strategic Education.

Miller, Riel, ed. 2018. Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century. Routledge.

Sardar, Ziauddin. 1993. „Colonizing the Future: The ‘Other’ Dimension of Futures Studies“. Futures 25(2):179–87. doi:10.1016/0016-3287(93)90163-N.