September 19, 2024  

6:00-8:00 pm 

Starr Foundation Hall

University Center, 63 Fifth Ave. NY      

The United Nations has organized the Summit of the Future for September 2024, prompted by the difficulties in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and new global problems facing regions and peoples. The summit documents focus on a single future assuming that international commitments and goals will be finally achieved. This future is the product of meetings after meetings for the past decades. It is presented as a one-in-a-generation opportunity to get on track and leave no one behind globally. 

However, we believe this is the time to also ask: Is this approach ambitious enough? Does it, can it, represent the aspirations of so many different peoples around the world? Is this enough to help different nations, communities, and cultures to identify their paths to empower their own expectations, desires, and capacities? If not, isn’t it time to change the way futures (in plural) are imagined and constructed? 

In this context, this panel will provide an opportunity to address and contest these questions from diverse national and disciplinary perspectives, and thereby make room for different approaches to imagining multiple and empowering futures. 

Speakers will examine different attitudes towards the future, means of articulating fears and desires for the world to come, including possibilities, limitations, and agency. The idea is to create spaces for more inclusive imaginations. The event will conclude with an open conversation with the audience about their thoughts and associations about futures.

AGENDA 

6pm                Welcoming Remarks   

                   Lisa Rubin

                         Interim Executive Dean, Schools of Public Engagement, The New School 

                         Introducing the Event 

                         Margarita Gutman

                         Emeritus Professor; Co-Director, OLA 

                         The UN Summit of the Future                    

                         Juan Manuel González Scobie

                         Senior Fellow, OLA  

PANELISTS

6.30 pm          Adam Brown

                          Vice Provost of Research; Professor of Psychology, The New School  

                           - The Power of Attitudes: Shaping futures and acting 

                          Darrick Hamilton

                          Director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, The New School 

                           - Boundaries of Worries: Designing Equitable Paths

                          Eliana Martinez Herrera

                          Professor of Public Health, Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia 

                           - People’s Creativity: Disrupting futures  

                         Sheela Patel

                          Founding Director Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Mumbai

                          - Vulnerability Empowered: Shaping socially just futures

7:30 pm          Open Discussion

                         Moderated by:  

                         Michael Cohen

                         Director, Doctoral Program in Public and Urban Policy; Co-Director, OLA