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Richard A Slaughter
Richard A Slaughter completed one of the first PhDs in futures studies at the University of Lancaster in 1982. He is an internationally recognised futurist / foresight practitioner, author, editor, teacher and innovator who has worked with a wide range of organisations in many countries and at all educational levels. He has built a reputation through futures scholarship, educational innovation, strategic and social foresight and the identification of a knowledge base for futures studies (KBFS). Currently he is Director of Foresight International (FI) in Brisbane. http://www.foresightinternational.com.au
After stints at several universities he was invited by the VC of Swinburne University in Melbourne to set up the Australian Foresight Institute. During 1999 to 2004 he was Foundation Professor of Foresight there and pioneered new approaches to advanced foresight training and research. A research program on Creating and Sustaining Social Foresight was funded and supported by the Pratt Foundation and produced a series of leading edge monographs. http://richardslaughter.com.au/?page_id=79 He is a long standing fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF). During 2001 - 2005 he was its President.
He is a prolific writer and holds several editorial positions. These include: board member of Futures (Oxford, UK), Foresight (UK), the Journal of Futures Studies (Tamkang University, Taiwan) and series editor of The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies (FI, Brisbane). His first book was Birds in Bermuda (Bermuda Bookstores, 1975). He is co-author of Education for the 21st Century (Routledge, 1993), author of The Foresight Principle - Cultural Recovery in the 21st Century (Praeger, 1995) editor of New Thinking for a New Millennium (Routledge, 1996) and co-editor of the World Yearbook of Education 1998: Futures Education (Kogan Page, London 1998).
He has published a series of futures resource books and an edited volume of essays: Futures for the Third Millennium: Enabling the Forward View (Prospect, Sydney, 1999) as well as a collection of papers by various authors from The ABN Report entitled: Gone Today, Here Tomorrow: Millennium Previews (Prospect, Sydney, 2000). A number of his publications have been revised and re-issued on a series of CD-ROMs, beginning with the Knowledge Base of Futures Studies vols 1-5 (FI, 2005) and Towards a Wise Culture: Four ‘Classic’ Futures Texts (FI, 2006). In 2006 a set of three DVDs on Pathways to Foresight was produced and published by Peak Futures, Colorado, USA, http://www.jaygary.com/peakfutures/peakfutures.shtml and FI.
He is the author of Futures Beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight (Routledge, London, 2004) and, with M Bussey, of Futures Thinking for Social Foresight, a compendium of teaching resources and strategies which is also available on CD-ROM (Tamkang University Press, 2007, 2nd edition, FI, 2012). With an international team of researchers Richard completed a study on The State of Play in the Futures Field (SOPIFF) for the Foundation for the Future, Seattle in 2008, later published in Foresight 11, 5, 2009. In 2010 he published a much-praised overview of the global predicament in The Biggest Wake-Up Call in History (FI, 2010) followed by To See With Fresh Eyes: Integral Futures and the Global Emergency (FI, 2012).
He has received professional recognition from several sources. These include two ‘Most Important Futures Works’ awards from the Association of Professional Futurists. The first was for the 2005 Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, Professional Edition, CD-ROM. The second was for editing a special issue of Futures on Integral Futures Methodologies in 2008. During 2009 Richard was appointed as Patron of the Asian Foresight Institute which is based at Dhurakij Pundit University in Bangkok. Then in 2010 he was voted one of ‘the best all-time Futurists’ by members of the Foresight Network, Shaping Tomorrow.
He is attempting to slowly ‘wind back’ a close to 40-year commitment to futures work in favour of a number of other fruitful activities. These include bird photography, 14th to 16th Century art and a small but growing number of grandchildren.
Richard's weblog, which contains commentaries, reviews, recent work, You Tube clips, image galleries and other resources, is at: http://www.richardslaughter.com.au Apart from the FI site he also administers Integral Futures http://integralfutures.com/wordpress/ and Strategic Foresight TV http://strategicforesight.tv/.