PROGRAMME DETAILS
Date: March 2021
Activity: Article on ‘Narrative Foresight and Covid-19: Successes and Failures in Managing the Pandemic’
Author: Dr Ivana Milojević and Professor Sohail Inayatullah (UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, IIUM)
Platform: Journal of Futures Studies via Journal of Futures Studies, March. 2021, 25(3): 79–84
“In this article, taking a text-based discourse approach (Shapiro, 1992), we outline narratives used to manage the COVID-19 pandemic and argue that some have been more and some less helpful for the current and future pandemic preparedness or shift to not only ‘new’ but a ‘better normal’.
This work develops on earlier work by Milojević (2021, in press) where she focused on narrative foresight frames – the stories individuals, organizations, states and civilizations tell themselves about the future. It linked these narratives to futures fallacies, or detrimental thinking patterns about the future. The text selected were based on being public sector futures-oriented responses to COVID-19, that is, “key narratives in circulation during the implementation of governments’ strategic objectives and the realization of visions of a ‘pandemic-free’ society (Milojević, 2021, in press).
This essay further develops the argument and organizes these narratives in terms of the discourses of blame, surprise/denial, exceptionalism, and alternatives of global solidarity, planning and social inclusion.
However, prior to these conclusions, we first explore the context of public policy responses: the rational-analytic versus the polis.”
English