Compassionate Futures for Collective Well-Being

In an increasingly unequal world, the concept of “compassionate futures” offers a new paradigm to address the pressing challenges of social inclusion. Compassionate futures recognize vulnerability, interdependency, and mutual responsibility as fundamental features of social relations, and emphasize care and empathy as fundamental principles in designing socio-cultural, economic, and political systems where the collective well-being of diverse actors, human and other-than-human, can flourish.

The global challenges of our time—climate crisis, forced migration, and political polarization—highlight the urgent need to move beyond traditional approaches to inclusion. We invite authors to work with the idea of homo curans (the caring person) in re-imagining the future of society, focusing on long-term, holistic, and progressive solutions or responses rather than short-term fixes. Standing in opposition to the prevalent figure of homo economicus, homo curans foregrounds dependency (rather than self-interest and self-sufficiency) as the default human condition. It positions care as an ontological a priori and suggests that care ought to be, and in fact is, an organizing principle of social life.

We encourage contributions that engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, practitioners, and policymakers about what it means to create a caring society in the face of persistent inequalities. In addition, we welcome papers that demonstrate where and how humans take up the responsibility to conceptualize compassionate futures from a multispecies perspective, as well as those that focus on what hinders or supports the idea and the project of compassionate futures.

Contributions to this thematic issue should focus on how systems can be reimagined to prioritize care and collective well-being, what it takes to move towards socio-cultural, economic, and/or political systems that emphasize vulnerability, interdependency, and mutual responsibility, how different cultures conceptualize the figure of the “caring person” and compassionate futures, how it can address the environmental crisis in ways that promote climate justice, how those most affected by environmental harm might be centered in the process of developing new narratives on compassionate futures and/or how the very idea of compassionate futures can be nurtured from an inquiry-by-method or an inquiry-by-theory perspective.

We accept theoretical papers presenting frameworks on compassionate futures, prospective policy analyses, cases featuring the use of futures studies and co-creative approaches that promote compassion and care as central principles in re-imagining the future, and reflection papers focusing on global cooperation for fostering compassionate futures. Authors should connect to the general idea of how humans could or should relate to other agents with whom they share the planet or illustrate how the new narratives they developed support collective well-being.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Social Inclusion is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.