Futures literacy laboratories are an experimental approach “aimed at discovering and analysing the attributes of conscious human anticipation.”9 The approach explores and experiments with the human innate capability to imagine, anticipate, and use-the-future by engaging with a process of revealing, reframing and re-thinking through several phases and overcoming anticipatory assumptions and the “poverty of the imagination.”10  FLL expands futures literacy and creative imagination about possible futures with the aim to provide a sustainable source of hope for a ‘better life’ in the future.11

The use of the FLL approach is justified as a research method applied to youth and social justice futures because as Riel Miller puts it, FLL is “highly adaptable and easily applied over a vast range of contexts”12 allowing for:

  •    a diversity of participants, topics, durations, resources, lead times, output requirements,
  • observing anticipatory assumptions about the futures of youth and social justice in potential practical experiments and performing these experiments over different contexts,
  •  enhancements to the capacity of participants to ‘use-the-future’ and to become more futures literate,
  •   provides evidence of the relationship between the development of futures literacy as a capacity and the ability to sense and make-sense of novelty,
  • provides evidence of an enhanced appreciation of time-place specificity/uniqueness arising from the combination of ‘collective intelligence knowledge creation’ processes and ‘using-the-future,’
  •   encouragement of sustainability, equity and peace by opening up new ways of framing hope and action locally and globally,
  •   initiates networks and communities of practice at the local and global levels related to advancing the theory and practice of ‘using-the-future.’13

The decision to use the FLL approach as a research method will have the following benefits:

  • creates a better understanding of Youth and Social Justice Futures (future skills, training needs and orientations in Africa) from theoretical, exploratory, and individual perspectives.
  • creates awareness of both the context and landscape of youth and social justice futures and future literacy capabilities.
  • enables the group to begin the process of questioning their assumptions about the future,
  •   enables creativity by exploring, extending, and deepening our ideas about the models, approaches and drivers of youth and social justice futures.

  initiates collective learning about why and how futures and foresight can be pertinent for activities within our communities of interest on youth and social justice future.