Research Profile

Portrait of Felicity El-Ghazali

Felicity El-Ghazali

Research Fellow in Future Studies

Short Bio

Felicity El-Ghazali investigates long-range societal change, developing methods that connect speculative inquiry with decision-making under uncertainty. Her work bridges anticipatory governance, design futures, and the ethics of foresight.

Research Interests

  • anticipatory governance
  • scenario design
  • futures literacy
  • sociotechnical imaginaries
  • long-term policy
  • risk and resilience modeling

Short CV

  • 2019–present: Research Fellow, Future Histories Institute
  • 2015–2019: Lecturer in Foresight, Institute for Societal Foresight
  • 2012–2015: Postdoctoral Scholar, Center for Anticipatory Systems

Affiliations

  • Future Histories Institute
  • Center for Anticipatory Systems

Education

  • PhD, Future Studies, Meridian Graduate School , 2012
  • MA, Strategic Foresight, Northbridge Institute of Design , 2008
  • BA, Sociology, Lumen College , 2006

Teaching

  • Anticipatory Systems and Foresight
  • Methods of Speculative Inquiry
  • Designing Futures: From Signals to Scenarios

Awards

  • Horizon Prize for Foresight Method Innovation , 2023
  • Early Career Award, Society for Futures Research , 2018

Publications

  • Felicity El-Ghazali, Temporal Negotiations: Governing the Long Now, Journal of Future Infrastructures , 2024.
  • Felicity El-Ghazali and J. Noor, From Signals to Structures: A Grammar of Emergent Futures, Foresight & Strategy Review , 2022.
  • Felicity El-Ghazali, The Commons of Uncertainty: Social Imagination as Civic Infrastructure, Civic Futures Quarterly , 2020.

Abstract

Predictive systems and human institutions are increasingly coupled through continuous feedback, where models shape expectations and expectations reshape data. This study develops a framework of temporal interlock to describe how civic rituals, governance routines, and machine learning pipelines co-produce near-future conditions. Using comparative scenario experiments and participatory prototyping, we show that when organizations rely on iterative forecasts to allocate attention and resources, those forecasts become infrastructural—embedding themselves in norms, budgets, and identities. The resulting interlock does not erase human agency; instead it redistributes it across technical artifacts, protocols, and publics. We argue that stewarding this distributed agency requires treating foresight as a shared civic utility, with auditable model horizons, pluralistic scenario baselines, and time-bound sunset clauses for predictive influence. Such measures enable societies to benefit from adaptive foresight while preventing path-dependent lock-in that narrows collective imagination.