Cynthia Selin

Titles

• Senior Global Futures Scholar, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory
• Associate Professor, School of Sustainability, College of Global Futures
• Associate Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, College of Global Futures
• Associate Professor, Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes

Biography

Cynthia Selin’s work explores how the future serves as a conceptual and concrete resource to make sense of the uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity of socio-technical change. The future is an important phenomenon in contemporary society and how the future is imagined, represented, produced, and consumed matters for good decision-making and good governance in the present. While the future is constantly evoked in relation to technological innovation, the meaning and import of futuring is seldom examined. By combining qualitative social science research with cutting edge experimental practice, Professor Selin’s research advances scholarly understanding of anticipation in society and invents new approaches to cultivating foresight to nurture greater reflexivity in systems of innovation.

She is an associate professor at Arizona State University in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the School of Sustainability; a senior scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at ASU; and an associate fellow at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, U.K., where she teaches in the Oxford Scenarios Programme.

Education

• PhD, Knowledge and Management, Institute for Politics, Philosophy and Management, Copenhagen Business School, 2006
• MA, Science and Technology Studies, Roskilde University/Maastricht University, 2000
• BA, American Studies, University of California-Santa Cruz, 1996

Expertise

• emerging technologies
• Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure
• urban planning
• decision making
• visual arts and media
• science fiction
• human values
• human dimensions of science and technology
• environmental imagination
• scenarios
• climate change impacts
• public deliberation
• innovation
• organizational theory
• policy and governance
• technological culture
• temporality