Designing a pluriversal foresight epistemology and schematic, an essay

This article emerges from a reflection on how current global transitions and paradigm shift (the Anthropocene, Artificial Intelligence revolution and post-colonial era being some of its markers) impact conventional western epistemologies; could it be possible, in the more open field of futures research, to explore an innovative pluralistic epistemological position? An academic research project on futurescaping , which includes an experiment on the future of museums, i.e. organizations deeply impacted by these transitions, becomes a context to engage an investigation shared in this article—following a presentation at the WFSF 26th Conference 2025, Stellenbosch University, Cape Town. The method consists in revisiting and continuing the post-structural and decolonial approach of foresight epistemology developed by Inayatullah [ 1 ] in his seminal essay Deconstructing Reconstructing the Future published in 1990, which already highlighted the limits of western epistemologies. Each of the three reviewed epistemology categories (predictive-positivist, cultural-hermeneutic, and critical-post-structural) is confronted with the current critical challenges mentioned before and enriched by new theoretical inputs to bridge and weave western and non-western knowledge towards the design of what could be a pluriversal epistemology. Its conceptual architecture takes the shape of a foundational schematic opening space to scape and constructed a plurality of perspectives on five levels of reality: Onto (ontologies), Micro (social uses), Meso (territories), Macro (planet), and Cosmo (worldviews). Behind the deconstruction of western, modernist, and post-modernist philosophies of knowledge and the reconstruction of a relevant and equitable pluralism, appears a rising and important political epistemology discussion, scholars of all disciplines should pay more attention to.