Transition Culture

As one of the co-founders of Cooperation Jackson and Executive Director of the non-profit division of Cooperation Jackson, Kali Akuno has spent the past four and a half years, through Cooperation Jackson, working to transform Jackson into ‘a beacon of radical politics’. For the uninitiated, Jackson is the capital city of Mississippi, with a population of around 200,000 people, with its 80% black population making it one of the blackest cities in the US, with 60% of people living below the poverty line. Cooperation Jackson is working, in a context of colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, to upend these dynamics through the building of a solidarity economy, to, as he puts it, “transform the material circumstances of the people living in Jackson”.

I was recently in Lille in France as a speaker at an event called the World Forum for a Responsible Economy.  One of my fellow speakers was Judy Wicks, who I've wanted to meet for years. Judy is from Philadelphia in the US, and is a retired entrepreneur, and was one of the founders of BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.  She now describes herself as an 'activist citizen', acting in a variety of ways which you'll hear about as we get into the conversation we had.  We met over breakfast in the hotel we were both staying in, so listen out for the rattle of tea cups and the distant munching of croissants.  I started by asking Judy to give us some background on BALLE.  What is it, and what does it do?

It was such an honour to speak to Dominique Christina.  Her work is remarkable.  Her voice is insistent and fierce and tender and kind and wrathful and beautiful, sometimes all at the same time.  She speaks truth to power in a way that few can. She describes herself as "a performing artist, an author, an educator and an activist". Her words can stir tears or they can stir revolutions. Her words awaken the imagination and invite it, blinking, into the world.  I think she's amazing, and by the end of this, you will too.  I started off our conversation by asking her what does imagination mean to you, what does it conjur up? http://www.dominiquechristina.com

Although the inquiry at the heart of my research on imagination is framed around the idea that we are, collectively, experiencing a decline in our collective imagination, not everyone I have interviewed agrees. Marjorie Taylor is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and author of ‘Imaginary Companions and the Children who Create Them’, and editor of the Oxford Book of the Development of Imagination. She researches the development of imagination and creativity, in particular on childhood imaginary friends, and also the relationships that adult fiction writers develop with characters in their novels. Much of her work is conducted in the beautifully-named ‘Imagination Lab’. She is on the editorial boards of the journals ‘Imagination, Cognition, and Personality’ and ‘The American Journal of Play’.

Last week I embarked on the 1o hour train journey to Dundee in Scotland to visit a project I had heard about on the radio called Art Angel. We know that stress, trauma, anxiety, loneliness and depression all have an adverse impact on the human imagination, causing it to contract and shrink. We know that people suffering from those things find it far harder to think about the future in positive ways, to feel any hope of possibility in what lies ahead.  As the UK faces what people are calling an 'anxiety epidemic', with an accompanying decline in imagination, I was curious as to what I might learn from an organisation that works with people on the hard end of the anxiety crisis, and how art, play and imagination can help.

A question that has arisen in my research around imagination and also in the recent interview I did with Stuart Candy was what would it look like if a local, city or national government were to create a ‘Ministry of Imagination’? If the revitalisation of the imagination were felt to be so important that its protection, enhancement and cultivation needed a bespoke department, one that cross-cut other departments, attempting to raise the imaginative capacity of the entire administration. It was an idea that really stuck with me.

A question that has arisen in my research around imagination and also in the recent interview I did with Stuart Candy was what would it look like if a local, city or national government were to create a ‘Ministry of Imagination’? If the revitalisation of the imagination were felt to be so important that its protection, enhancement and cultivation needed a bespoke department, one that cross-cut other departments, attempting to raise the imaginative capacity of the entire administration. It was an idea that really stuck with me.

A question that has arisen in my research around imagination and also in the recent interview I did with Stuart Candy was what would it look like if a local, city or national government were to create a ‘Ministry of Imagination’? If the revitalisation of the imagination were felt to be so important that its protection, enhancement and cultivation needed a bespoke department, one that cross-cut other departments, attempting to raise the imaginative capacity of the entire administration. It was an idea that really stuck with me.

One of the best books I read this summer was Stephen Duncombe’s ‘Dream: re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy’.  Written during the last days of the presidency of George W. Bush, it was a plea for progressive politics to embrace imagination, spectacle, wit, sensuality and what one reviewer called “a joyful aesthetic of dissent”. I loved the book’s assertion that “unless progressives acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire and spectacle, and, most important, make it ethical and make it our own, we will bring about our “ruin rather than preservation”.

The initial spark that set me off thinking that I needed to write a book about imagination was reading a study by a professor at College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, whose name is Kyung Hee Kim, known as ‘K’ to her friends (because they kept getting her full name wrong).  K is originally from Korea, and came to the US in 2000. She already had a Masters and a PhD from her time in Korea, but when she came to the US she did a second PhD under the supervision of Dr Ellis Paul Torrance, known as the ‘Father of Creativity’.  Torrance created the famous Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, known as ‘the gold standard of creativity testing’.  He passed away in 2003, but K has since continued her research into creativity.

One of the highlights of my summer was collecting my Totnes Passport.  The whole Brexit debacle from inception to its current state of woeful ineptitude and brazen jingoism has been one entirely bereft of imagination.  Neither side has presented any kind of an imaginative story, either as to the wonderful things Brexit might enable, or the wonderful possibilities that remaining in the EU might present.  The whole thing has felt like an imagination vacuum.  I was delighted then to hear that in my town, a local solicitor, Jonathan Cooper, had decided to start issuing passports for the ‘City State of Totnes’ - a member of the European Union, and that within just a few days, the story had spread around the world.

What happens when play disappears from our cities?  In a report for the National Trust, Stephen Moss writes "a potential impact is that children who don't take risks become adults who don't take risks".  One response is the Playable City movement.  It defines a Playable City as "a city where people, hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places and story".  It's a movement that started in Bristol, and believes that "by encouraging public activities that actively bring joy, we can create a happier, more cohesive urban future".  Examples thus far, in Bristol, have included a 300ft waterslide on one of the city's steepest shopping streets, a zombie chase around the city centre, and lampposts you can interact with.  The idea has since spread around the world to cities including Tokyo, Seoul, Lagos and Austin.  I spoke to Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Producer for Playable City, who leads on the delivery of Playable City projects, based at the Watersh

Listening to Drew Dellinger’s poetry regularly gives me goosebumps. Very shortly it will give you goosebumps too. He is a US-based writer, poet, speaker and teacher whose passions revolve around ecology, social justice, cosmology, social change and transformation. He uses arts activism to build movements, such as ‘Planetise the Movement’ which he founded. He is fascinated by the big stories that operate in our culture and the power of arts education and activism. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a deeply thoughtful and powerfully eloquent man. It was my great honour that he gave me an hour of his time to talk imagination, an hour that I found moving, inspiring and deeply thought-provoking. You’re going to love this one. I started by asking him what, for him, is imagination? When he thinks of the word imagination, what does it bring up for him?

Stuart Candy is a professional futurist and is an Associate Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His collaborative Experiential Futures practice brings possible scenarios to life through the creation of tangible artifacts and immersive situations which give people a very real taste of how different versions of the future might turn out. As you’ll hear he playfully brings future scenarios alive in the present, through collaborations with designers, artists, actors, activists, businesses and more, and he has worked in many different places. He was recently at the Transition Design Symposium at Dartington, and I took the opportunity to sit under a tree in the shade on a gloriously sunny day for the following fascinating conversation with Stuart about the future, the imagination and the creative approaches he has developed.

Last week, close to my home, was the Transition Design Symposium. It brought together people from around the world interested in what design can bring to the need for an urgent societal Transition, and for 2 days its attendees basked in glorious sunshine and fascinating interactions. I managed to catch up with Michel Bauwens who was attending and speaking at the conference, and we took some time for a short chat sitting under a tree in sunshine. Michel spends half his time in Belgium and half in Thailand, and is the founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organisation of researchers working in collaboration to explore peer production, governance and property. He is a writer, researcher and speaker on the subjects of technology, culture and business innovation. “It’s about Open Source communities”, he told me. “A lot of it is like what you are doing with Transition, perhaps a bit of a difference would be that I try to look more at the trans-local, trans-national levels, and how we can build counter-power

Rima Staines is an artist, musician and illustrator, puppet-maker, stop-frame animator, clock-maker, theatre designer and one half of Hedgespoken with her partner Tom Hirons.  Tom is a writer of poetry and prose and teller of traditional folk tales.  Together they created ‘Hedgespoken’, a travelling off-grid storytelling theatre run from a 1966 Bedford RL lorry, converted to be a home and a go-anywhere stage.  On one bumper it says ‘Vehicle for the Imagination’ and on the other ‘Imagination, Liberation’.  They travel, present stories, share artworks, having raised the money to convert the vehicle through a crowdfunder. We met one morning at a local café with, as you'll hear, their energetic young son, and over the space of a couple of cups of tea we talked imagination, storytelling, the visual arts and much more.  I started by asking them to tell me more about Hedgespoken, and how, for them, it acts as a focal point for their work around imagination.

Close to where I live is a project called Landworks. Landworks describes itself as "an independent charity providing a supported route back into employment and community for those in prison or at risk of going to prison".  I often walk my dog past it, and from the road you can see their polytunnels, a beautiful cob wall with roundwood pole roof, their vegetable beds, and many of the things they make are for sale in their beautiful roadside shop. Landworks began in 2013, and over that time 60 men and 4 women have spent up to 9 months there, learning new skills and taking part in their programme.   In our last post here, Robert Macfarlane suggested that "in some ways imagination is a function of privilege".  So what are the links between trauma, anxiety, poverty and the imagination? What does prison do to the imagination?  How might cultivating the imagination play a role in rehabilitating people in prison?  What might more imaginative approaches to prison look like, approaches which are land-based, practical

Urinetown by Rob Hopkins

They say you should never meet your heroes. They’re wrong. I recently had the huge honour of spending almost an hour in conversation with Robert MacFarlane, author of 9 books including ‘Mountains of the Mind’, ‘The Old Ways’, ‘Landmarks’ and, most recently, ‘The Lost Words’. I have admired Robert’s work for many years, in particular his reflections on imagination and his determination to keep alive, in our minds and our culture, a whole library of words which help us better articulate our place in, and relationship with, the natural world. As well as being a writer, Robert teaches at Cambridge about language and landscape. As he told me, “the convergences of those two things, along with social justice and environmental justice, are the things I’ve written most about”.

Today we're talking about technology and the fragmentation of attention with Maggie Jackson. After an early career as a foreign correspondent, Maggie returned to the US and began writing about workplace and worklife issues. She began noticing the impact of early technologies such as laptops and cellphones on people.  At that time, the tone of the national conversation was quite utopian and, Maggie felt, naive. "I call it the gee-whiz factor", she told me, "many people truly thought that technologies were going to solve our problems, connect us, teach us, transport us, magically and painlessly".  Voicing any concerns or pointing out downsides easily had one labelled as a Luddite. In 2008, many years before the current debates around technology and attention, Maggie wrote the book 'Distracted', which dived into the science of attention and the steep costs of its fragmentation. She is currently working on a book about uncertainty as the gateway to good thinking in an age of snap judgement.  We chatted recently