Decolonial futures, African futurity, Afrofuturism, and feminist futures are currently framed in futures studies, at best as important ‘critical’ or alternative add-ons, at worst, marginal futures pursued by particular voices. I aspire to demonstrate why these ‘critical’ or ‘radical futures’ approaches should be read as essential in a pluriversal approach to futures studies. If our field is truly interdisciplinary, its centre(s) should reflect the pluriversality of its past, present, and future. By doing so, I claim that the aforementioned approaches, also known as critical futures, are the ones helping futurists today articulate the most fundamental questions for the definition of futures studies. They are therefore everything but peripheral. These key questions are structured around the importance of agency in a broader understanding of futures studies. They articulate imagination, rest, empathy, engaged participation, and the admission of ignorance as central pillars of the work of futurists. First describing the central questions from these four ‘schools of thought’ and their centrality for futures studies, the chapter finds in their misclassification one of the explanations for their erasure and proposes five ways to prevent its perpetuation. A pluriversal definition of futures studies as the documentation, implementation, and assessment of the instrumentalisation of the future by some or several groups of living beings would enable futurists to truly embrace the value of these different schools of thought and articulate a more accurate definition of the field.
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