Event report

Foresight - or future thinking - provides scope for people to think about what possibilities the future might hold. In the EUARENAS project, we have been investigating with how contemporary media discourses (i.e., what the media is talking about) can help us identify future signals about our societies and democracies. As part of this work, we have recently run an online workshop for citizens, researchers, people working in the policy arena and civil society actors to look at different pieces of media content from across Europe and use this as stimuli to start to talk about the future. The media content we looked at highlighted how issues such as climate change, migration, human rights, and failings in democracy were all key issues now, and this sparked discussion about the opportunities and challenges for our future worlds. This online workshop identified some key challenges for democracy, opportunities for democracy and key drivers of change in society (see Idea linked to this report). These findings - and others from foresight activities being undertaken in the EUARENAS - will be synthesised into an insight briefing that we will be launching late Autumn 2021.