Introducing the Creative Futures Focus
A Free Online Conversation with Professor Alfonso Montouri, Ph.D.
What happened to the future? Dystopian futures are everywhere. There is great anxiety about where the world is going. The threat of authoritarianism plays on this fear of the future with a call for a strong man to take charge.
The Creative Futures Focus is designed to provide an understanding of the complexity of the current global and local situation, mobilize the imagination, and design strategies for agency and transformation at the personal, local, and global level. Yet we cannot create new futures with the same ways of thinking and acting and the same creativity that brought us here.
If we are to overcome this global existential crisis, new concepts, new ways of thinking, new ways of relating, and new ways of creating are needed that address the complexity of the situation, as well as a deep reflection into what really matters. We begin where we are, right here, right now.
Host Bio
Alfonso Montouri is Professor in the Transformative Inquiry Department at California Institute of Integral Studies. Originally an Italian citizen, Alfonso lived in the Netherlands, Lebanon, Greece, England, and China settled in the United States in the mid-1980s. He has been Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Fine Arts at Miami University in Oxford Ohio, and Distinguished Visiting Professor in Psychology at the University of Rome. In 1985-1986 he taught at the Central South University in Hunan, China. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Routledge Handbook of Creative Futures, co-edited with Gabrielle Donnelly, and numerous articles on the future, creativity, leadership, culture, complexity, and education. He is the co-editor of World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research, and on the editorial board of several journals. An active performer on saxophones, flute and electronic wind instruments, he lives in San Francisco with his wife, award-winning jazz singer Kitty Margolis, with whom he performs and records.