Aarathi Krishnan
Humanitarian Futures and Strategic Foresight Advisor
UNHCR, UN, and ICRC
Aarathi Krishnan specialises in humanitarian futures and strategic foresight. She has worked in humanitarian and development aid globally for over 15 years and now focuses her work on reimagining futures for the humanitarian system and social change. She works at the intersection of humanitarian futures, strategic foresight, and systems transformation. She supports a range of international humanitarian organisations on how to embed foresight and strategy to drive institutional and systems transformation, including the UN in Cambodia and Macedonia, UNDP, UNHCR and ICRC . She is also working on research initiatives with a range of partners, including the World Economic Forum, on inclusive technologies, AI and Civil Society Futures. She is specifically interested in issues of planetary health, inclusive and equitable technology futures, new forms of growth and power, with a lens on decolonised and feminist futures. She writes and speaks publicly and can be found on Twitter at @akrishnan23
Talks
Humanitarian Futures, Post-Covid and Mass Flourishing
The disruptions of the global pandemic have dismantled our status quo in a space of 2-3 weeks. It demonstrates that the wounds of our commons have fundamentally and irrevocably shifted. We know now that we can’t build back to what it was before - that the global pandemic has shown up in harsh light the fundamental cracks in our global systems and structures. And thus, the institutions we were prior to this cannot be the institutions we must be post this. What could the new normals in a post- COVID world look like, how do we design for a more just, more equal world, that pays attention to those that would normally fall between the cracks? How do we make the invisible, visible in our new world?
