richardslaughter.com.au

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. Currently he is Director of Foresight International, 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 program on Creating and Sustaining Social Foresight was supported and funded by the Pratt Foundation and produced a series of monographs (http://www.swinburne.edu.au/business/research_reports.html) 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). Several 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 (Foresight International 2005) and Towards a Wise Culture: Four ‘Classic’ Futures Texts (Foresight International 2006). In 2006 a set of three DVDs called Pathways to Foresight (http://www.jaygary.com/peakfutures/peakfutures.shtml) was produced and published by Peak Futures and Foresight International.

Two key publications are Futures Beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight (Routledge, London, 2004) and, with M Bussey, Futures Thinking for Social Foresight (Tamkang University Press, 2007) which is also available on CD-ROM. With a team of other researchers Richard completed a study on the State of Play in the Futures Field (SOPIFF) for the Foundation for the Future, Seattle in 2008. As well as working on a new series of papers on aspects of integral futures he is also writing a non-academic book on the ‘civilisational challenge’ facing humankind. In 2009 he received an award from the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) for editing a special issue of Futures on Integral Futures Methodologies. It was deemed to be one of three ‘most important futures works of 2008.’ Also during 2009 Richard was appointed as Patron of the Asian Foresight Institute which is based at Dhurakij Pundit University in Bangkok. His two non-academic passions remain bird photography and art.