📅 9–10 June 2026
📌 University of Turku, Finland
🔗 futuresconference2026.com
This year’s Futures Conference focuses on the critical theme of the sustainability transformation. This fundamental shift will renew societal and economic systems and practices, while also enhancing human agency, well-being and quality of life. The conference emphasises the importance of temporality by asking what intergenerational decision-making within the limits of the planet’s ecological boundaries means in practice.
Annual Futures Conferences organised by Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC) and Finland Futures Academy are an invaluable opportunity for meeting, exchanging and debating current topics related to futures studies and foresight. If you are looking for networking and collaborating with futurists and researchers, this is the place to be in June 2026!
This year, the event will host three distinguished keynote speakers. In addition, there will be around 110 spoken presentations across academic paper 30 sessions, and around 18 workshops and special sessions. The detailed programme will be released in mid-May.
Keynote Speakers:
• Professor Inger Birkeland (University of South-Eastern Norway, Norway): “Imagining Sustainable Futures: Narratives of place in heritage-making”
• Professor Per Högselius (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden): “The Future of Extractivism: Navigating Planetary Boundaries, Wicked Problems and Geopolitical Turmoil”
• Associate Professor Geci Karuri-Sebina (University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa): “More than North Futures, More than South Possibilities”
The European R&I foresight project Eye of Europe will host a special session on Foresight as a Key Social Infrastructure for Europe . The onsite special session features, among others, Eye of Europe coordinator Radu Gheorghiu (UEFISCIDI), Philine Warnke (Fraunhofer ISI), Susanne Giesecke (AIT), Eliza Savvopoulou (Helenos Consulting), and Juha Kaskinen (FFRC). During this session, the Manifesto for Foresight as a Key Social Infrastructure for Europe will be presented, recognising the growing importance of foresight , not only within R&I systems but also at the interface between R&I and society.
The conference event will be hosted at the University of Turku campus in Turku, Finland. The seats for the event are limited, so we urge you to register as soon as possible and to start planning your travels. If you have any questions about the conference and its arrangements, do not hesitate to contact our conference secretariat via futuresconference@utu.fi.
We are looking forward to seeing you in Turku in June!
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The Futures Conference 2026 is organised by Finland Futures Research Centre and Finland Futures Academy, University of Turku in collaboration with Sustainability Transformations Doctoral Education Pilot – SusTra. Conference website: futuresconference2026.com.
