Writing The Future

Through essays, poetry, stories, and images, writers and artists offer their perceptions of how we fit into the world and where we might be headed.

Writing the Future by literacy consultant, Director of Read4Success, and long-time PETAA collaborator, Dr Kaye Lowe examines how writing empowers learners to develop the skills required for 21st century success. It explores the power of writing to change and shape how writers think and engage with their worlds.Writing the Future has an exciting premise: the core skills involved in writing-creativity, critical thinking, communication, social and personal skills align with skills identified as essential for thriving in today's digital world. Kaye argues that writing nurtures these skills and, in turn, prepares today's writers for future work, citizenship and life.Kaye passionately believes that to achieve this goal, teachers need to be writers too. Her mission, and the mission of Writing the Future, is to support all learners to realise their potential as writers. Writing the Future expands on ideas presented in Kaye's highly valued PETAA publication, For the Love of Reading, and continues the conversation we started at our 2018 Writing the Future Professional Learning Intensive.

A prescient exploration of the fate of the book in the digital age.

For the Love of Reading examines the world of the struggling reader from multiple perspectives. This book weaves together perspectives on reading drawn from a field of reading research that is rich and varied. Ideas for creating a network of support through parent involvement, providing authentic and meaningful experiences, and implementing a curriculum that instils a love and desire to learn are shared. This book examines reading as a tapestry.

This book links popular British fiction from the 1790s through the 1860s to anxieties about time. The cataclysm of the French Revolution, discoveries in geology, biology, and astronomy that greatly expanded the age and size of the universe, and technological developments such as the railway and the telegraph combined to transform the experience of time and dramatize its aporetic nature--time as inarticulable contradiction.

How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat's works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries--and sometimes collaborators--A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture. Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat's work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat's extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city.

Located at the juncture of literature, history, and anthropology, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future charts a strategy of how one might read a traditional text of non-Western historical literature in order to generate, with it, an opening for the future. This book does so by taking seriously a haunting work of historical prophecy inscribed in the nineteenth century by a royal Javanese exile--working through this writing of a colonized past to suggest the reconfiguration of the postcolonial future that this history itself apparently intends. After introducing the colonial and postcolonial orientalist projects that would fix the meaning of traditional writing in Java, Nancy K. Florida provides a nuanced translation of this particular traditional history, a history composed in poetry as the dream of a mysterious exile. She then undertakes a richly textured reading of the poem that discloses how it manages to escape the fixing of "tradition." Adopting a dialogic strategy of reading, Florida writes to extend--as the work's Javanese author demands--this history's prophetic potential into a more global register. Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study. Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature. Florida reveals how this history's episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography--thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future.

This volume presents a comprehensive analysis of global future scenarios and their impact on a growing, shared culture. Ever since the end of the Cold War, a diverse range of future concepts has emerged in various areas of academia—and even in popular journalism. A number of these key concepts—‘the end of history,’ ‘the clash of civilizations,’ ‘the coming anarchy,’ ‘the world is flat,’ ‘soft power,’ ‘the post-American century’—suggest what could become characteristic of this new, interconnected world. Ulf Hannerz scrutinizes these ideas, considers their legacy, and suggests further dialogue between authors of the ‘American scenario’ and commentators elsewhere.