Marcus Bussey

Biography

Dr Marcus Bussey is an educator and futurist with more than 35 years’ experience. He has taught widely throughout Australia having spent 5 years at a yoga based neohumanist school, 4 years in an urban community school run by a parent cooperative, 7 years in Montessori primary and high schools, and 16 years at USC where he currently teaches world history and the philosophy of history. He is also heavily involved with supervision of higher degree students and is deeply committed to the University’s goals of increased research capacity and quality research with high impact. Marcus is also the Deputy Head, School of Law and Society where he is involved with learning and teaching and promotes innovations in student engagement and finding ‘real life’ and ‘hands on’ opportunities for students in the Humanities.

In 2014 Marcus was awarded a Taiwan Fellowship for 2014. This fellowship allowed him to work with colleagues at Tamkang University and the National Taiwan University on developing futures thinking in undergraduate engineering students. The outcomes of this research engagement appeared in the research paper he publishes with Song, Mei Mei Song and Hsieh (Patrick) Shang-Hsien: Anticipatory Imagination as a Tool for Rethinking Engineering Education which appeared in Journal of Professional Issues in Engineering Education and Practice, 143(4).

Marcus has presented papers on futures, phenomenology, anticipatory aesthetics and intercultural engagement in Taiwan, Croatia, Israel, India, Sweden, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Finland, Denmark, Brazil, France, Timor Leste and the US. In 2003, he completed a pilot study for the Queensland Department of Families as part of their project 'Queensland 2020: A State for All Ages'. This included a stimulus paper and 20-minute video, both entitled 'Youth Voices: Young Queenslander’s Values in a Time of Structural Ageing'.

Marcus is a researcher involved with USC's Sustainability Research Centre (SRC). Core interests are social learning and adaptive capacity in which all theory is grounded in practice and hope is built into all research premises and processes. He is interested in the intersection of cultures and their languages and loves to run embodied workshops that build personal agency and capacity along with inclusivity and a tolerance for complexity, chaos and open-ended processes (rather than answers). He is committed to also developing, via such approaches, the theoretical confidence to advocate for these in professional and community contexts. In keeping with this research focus he has co-edited the 2019 Routledge publication The Dynamics of Dissent: Theorising Movements for Inclusive Futures, and the 2020 Palgrave publication Phenomenologies of Grace: The Body, Embodiment and Transformative Futures.

Marcus is passionate about alternative ways of communicating emergent knowledge in wicked times. In this area he is leading with Gary Crew, Lisa Chandler and Rachel Robinson, a special issue of the journal TEXT on the theme of Anticipatory Imaginaries. This issue, published in October 2018, includes creative works written and produced in response to stimulus from a discipline expert. Such work is being continued in his collaboration with Indian scholars in the important Virtues in Movement Project.

Committed to putting Futures thinking into action Marcus is currently Chief Investigator (CI) on a USC/Sunshine Coast Council regional partnership exploring Excellence in Community Engagement (2019-2021). He is also a CI in the MISTRA funded project TRANSEC exploring environmental communication in wicked times.

Marcus has authored over 150 articles and book chapters. In addition to the two texts mentioned above, Marcus has co-edited both Neohumanist Educational Futures: Liberating the Pedagogical Intellect (Tamkang University Press: 2006) and Alternative Educational Futures: Pedagogies for Emergent Worlds (Sense Publishers, 2008) with Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojević, and co-authored Futures Thinking for Social Foresight with Richard Slaughter (2005). Furthermore, he co-edited with Jennifer Fitzgerald the book Fire in Our Eyes, Flowers in Our Hearts: Tantric Women Tell Their Stories (Gurukula Press, 2007).

Marcus has two books of poetry in print. The first was Clare and Francis: Conversations of Divine Love (Blue Dolphin Publishing, 2012). This book of poetry was translated into Bengali and published as Clare and Francis: Divya Prem Sanglap. (Trans: Meera Chakravorty) in 2018 by New Baipatra, Kolkata. The second is The Next Big Thing! published by Studera Publications in 2019.

Potential research projects for HDR and honours students

Future studies:

• Anticipatory Aesthetics
• Anticipatory Imagination
• Educational Futures
• Transformative Pedagogies
• Social Learning and Cultural Addiction
• Causal Layered Analysis
• Neohumanist Futures
• Sustainable Futures
• Hope and Embodied Social Action
• Creative Traditionalism and Cultural Citizenship
• Poststructural Encounters
• Practical Spirituality

World History:

• Macrohistory and Macrohistorians
• Social Cycles
• World Historical Processes
• Civilisation and Paradigm Shift
• Historiography
• Hegemony and Social Change
• Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar
• Art/Music History

Teaching areas

• World History
• Sustainable Futures
• Futures Studies

Professional memberships

• Member, Union of International Associations
• Member, Editorial Board, 'The Journal of Futures Studies'
• Member, Editorial Board, 'On the Horizons'
• World Futures Study Federation (WFSF)
• Association of Professional Futurists (APF)
• International Advisory Board, Regional Centre of Expertise, West Swede
• Honorary Member, Humanimal Earth Lartigau Project
• Board Member, Ananda Marga Gurukula
• Advisory Board Member, Swami Vivekananda University of Social Work and Social Transformation
• Member, School Board, Montessori International College, Buderim, Queensland, Australia
• Member, School Board, Maleny River School, Queensland, Australia

Awards and Fellowships

• Visiting Faculty/Fellow, Chandigarh University, Punjab, India September 2018.
• Faculty Internal Grants (x2) 1. Anticipatory Imaginaries; 2. Cultures of Transformation and Unease, 2017.
• School of Social Sciences Internal Grant $10000, Toilet Futures, 2015
• Advance Award: Advancing Quality Teaching, 2014, USC
• Taiwan Fellow 2014: Engineering for the Futures of Taiwan
• Visiting Fellow (2012–2013) at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in the Centre for Excellence in National Security, Singapore
• Research Fellow in Regional Futures (2009–2011) at USC’s Sustainability Research Centre
• Emerald Literati Network Award for Excellence (2010) for his paper: ‘Six Shamanic Concepts: Charting the between in futures work in the journal foresight (2009) 11(2), pp: 29–42

Expert media commentary

Dr Marcus Bussey's specialist areas of knowledge include future studies, world history, consciousness, sustainability and adaptive capacity, culture and heritage, social learning, educational futures, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, social theory, macrohistory and social change.