See below for a catalogue of required and optional course texts. For more, see the Journal of Futures Study, which offers a topics page that should serve you well.
Course Reader
- Join the Conversation, by Lisa Blankenship et al. (ebook)
Essays
- “The Rhetorical Situation,” by Lloyd F. Bitzer
- “Pandemics: Lessons Looking Back from 2050,” by Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson
- “Futures Fallacies: Our Common Delusions When Thinking About the Future,” by Abril Chimal
- “Revising Attitudes,” by Brock Dethier
- “Discourse Matters: Designing Better Digital Futures,” by Annette Markham
- “The Medium is the Message,” by Marshall McLuhan
- “Welcome to Postnormal times,” Ziauddin Sardar
Articles
- “The Road to Ustopia,” by Margaret Atwood
- “Imagining the Future Is Just Another Form of Memory,” by Julie Beck
- “In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing,” by Om Malik
- “How Do You Know That a Human Wrote This?” by Farhad Manjoo
- “NASA Just Launched Its New Perseverance Rover to Mars,” by Daniel Oberhaus
- “After George Floyd and Juneteenth,” by David Remnick
- “In the Distance: Clean Air Post-COVID-19,” by Jessica Seddonet, Ken Wakabayashi, and Beatriz Cardenas
- “The Workforce is About to Change Dramatically,” by Derek Thompson
Fiction
- “The Farm,” by Charlie Jane Anders
- “Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet,” by Margaret Atwood
- “The Book of Martha,” by Octavia Butler
- “The Machine Stops,” by E.M. Forster
- “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” by Ursula K. Le Guin
Poetry
- “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” by Richard Brautigan
- “We” & “Fast,” by Jorie Graham
- “Vantage,” by Natasha Tretheway
Photography
- “H+” by Matthieu Gafsou
- “Coping,” by MAPS Members
- “A Photographer on the Front Lines of Philadelphia’s Protests,” article by David Remnick, with photographs by Isaac Scott
- “A Dystopian Vision of the Future: Toxic but Candy Sweet,” article by Sara Urbaez, with photographs by Fernando Montiel Klint
Visualizations
- Why Time Flies by Maximilian Kiener
- Wealth, Shown to Scale by Matt Korostoff
Podcasts
- A stock market for social justice, TED, Zigzag S5 EP1, with Eric Ries
- Changing Our Relationship to STUFF, TED, Zigzag S5 EP5, with Adam Minter
Websites
Speeches
- Transcription: “Be Your Own Story,” Toni Morrison
- Transcription: “This is Water,” by David Foster Wallace
Film
