Research Methods Lineage Report (NGFP)

May 05, 02026

Dear Director Rowen, 

I am glad to hear you ran into Lady Sarah Spencer—if you see her again, please send her my regards. I hope to join the judges’ pool once again, if they’ll have me. I am also glad to hear that you may begin to take my methods seriously. I know that our colleagues at Mission HQ—you included—have viewed my methods as “too radical” and “wacky.”  As you will read in this note, I did not make these methods up “willy nilly,” as you have suggested on multiple occasions.

As you may or may not know, the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP) is a network of over 900 people all over the world who are using futures and foresight to create positive impact and systemic transformation globally. NGFP was launched by the School of International Futures (SOIF) in 02018. 

In the fall of 02025, I was asked to join a judging panel for NGFP’s Fellowship—specifically, I was a member of the Future Methods from Around the World & Indigenous Futures panel. Throughout this experience, I met futures and foresight practitioners, read and rated candidates’ applications, and got a view into what futures and foresight can be when approached through the lenses of justice and ancestral wisdom. 

As you so often remind me—my academic background is not as polished as some of our colleagues, and I was admittedly nervous walking into this experience. My fellow judges and the more experienced practitioners assured me: one does not need a degree or academic “stamp of approval” to practice this work. The candidates themselves taught me incredible things through their ideation and dreams for the futures of their communities. This experience helped me reframe my work using a futures lens, and kicked off a whirlwind of learning—primarily from women of color and their ancestries. 

Since entering the space of futures and foresight through this door, I have learned:

• How to time travel via backcasting 
• How to approach time and lineage as a spiral—as Octavia Butler says, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
• That everything we do now informs the future(s). Though I knew this academically, NGFP led to some learnings that have helped me embody this idea more fully.
• How to learn from and include our more-than-human neighbors in decision making (this includes, in my view, Godzilla and other kaiju)

I have no doubt that without these learnings, Mission Kaiju_Love_Care_Futures_02026 would not exist in its current form. As you know, our research asks: “ What might the future(s) look like if humankind were to implement lessons from The Godzilla franchise about love, mutual trust and collaboration, anti-fascism, the world, and ourselves?”

A NOTE ON WHITEWASHING AND VIOLENCE: These methods, introduced to me via NGFP and sharpened by learning from justice-forward futures and foresight practitioners (primarily women of color), are rooted in centuries of dreaming, working, and living. Please know that when I refer to futures and foresight, I am referring to futures and foresight for collective liberation. As I have been learning more about futures and foresight in general, I have learned that some practitioners use these methods to help the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other institutions that serve the U.S. Empire and other colonial projects prepare for the future. I am not interested in any futures in which these institutions thrive. 

As you have heard me say before, nothing is neutral. Mission Kaiju_Love_Care_Futures_02026 aims to not only avoid replication of this kind of violence, but to actively work against it. As Mindy Seu writes in Cyberfeminism Index, “I think that the greatest feminist technology has always been the practice of citation, because it shows everything, in some way, is co-authored, that it was never about the individual hero. Always a collective or community.” (Read more about honoring the lineage of our work in Field Report No. 6.) As a white person with a lineage rooted in violence and usury, it is important to name here that co-optation and whitewashing is an inherent risk. NGFP has opened doors for me to check my assumptions and build a network of informal advisors who help me unpack my biases and relationship to power along the way. 

I do hope that this report lends Mission Kaiju_Love_Care_Futures_02026 some credibility, and that you cease with your teasing. I did not make these things up. (I made a few things up, but not the methods.) 

Yours in Science, 

Dr. Tex “Steve” Collins