Transition Culture

I recently taught at Schumacher College, and spoke about the work I am doing about imagination.  Afterwards, a few students came up to me and said "you must speak to Vanessa Andreotti"!   She had, earlier that week, Skyped into the class, and presented her thinking about imagination, among other things.  So I tracked her down and got in touch, and we had the following fascinating conversation.  Vanessa is a Professor, and is the Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at the University of British Columbia. She has a particular interest in education for, and about, international development, in global citizenship education, in global justice and in the ethics of internationalization.  I started out by ask

I went to the Soundart Radio SoundCamp's dawn chorus walk this morning (6th May 2018). Here's how the dawn chorus sounded.

David Sax is a journalist living in Toronto, Canada, and he is the author of the book The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. I found David’s book fascinating, with its suggestion that the current revival of vinyl, books, photographers using real film, physical notebooks, all speak to something deeper that is happening in the world around us. How, I wondered, does analog interact with our imaginations in a way that digital can’t? Do real, tangible, actual things provide more for our imaginations to connect to, to be sparked by, to colonise?

A while ago I was reading a report about the psychological impacts of climate change, and came across the term ‘pre-traumatic stress disorder’. It fascinated me. The author of the piece that discussed the idea was Lise van Susteren. Lise is a General and Forensic Psychiatrist in Washington D.C , and has been involved in climate change issues for the last 12 years or so. In 2005 she sought political office, seeking the Democratic nomination to the US Senate in Maryland. She describes ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ as “a before-the-fact version of classic PTSD”. I was intrigued as to what impact living in a state of ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ might have on the human imagination, on its ability to flourish, and to imagine the future in positive ways. Are we all, to one degree or another, living in a state of ‘Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder’? When we spoke, I started by asking Lise what the term means to her?

When I was recently at the #CTRLshift2018 conference in Wigan, one project that many people were talking about was Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn’s ‘The Bank Job’, currently underway in a former bank in Walthamstow. It had just been featured in The Guardian under the headline ‘The rebel bank, printing its own notes and buying back people's debts’, and was generating a real buzz. I was instantly smitten. It looked like a project that brought together many of the things I love: local currencies, people actually making things, community, a playful approach to a serious subject, creating a space the invites the imagination in, and beautiful design. All it needed was a small craft brewery on the side, and I’d be moving in! Looking into it more, it turned out that Dan and Hilary are working together on a feature film called ‘Bank Job’, and that the Bank is a part of that. Hilary is an artist, Dan is a filmmaker. https://bankjob.pictures/

This is a website about the power of “what if?”, and how, in a time of existential challenges, we might take “what if?” ideas and make them a reality. “What if we tackled climate change with imagination, courage and positivity?” is one such question that runs through all our blogs here. But I have been deeply impressed by the work of Daniel Raven Ellison and his efforts to try to get the city of London designated as a ‘National Park City’. As we’ll see, it is a powerful “what if”, one that opens up the imagination and all manner of possibilities.

It was billed as “an emergency summit for change”, and it was a call that drew around 150 people from across the UK, and even some from further afield. Hosted at The Edge, a community-funded church building in the centre of Wigan just round the corner from the actual Wigan Pier (yes, that one, the one with the road famously leading to it), the event, exactly a year before Brexit becomes (or doesn’t) a reality, was co-presented by at least 40 organisations. I went along to speak to people about why they'd come, what they wanted to get from it, and how it was going. And to participate. This podcast is compiled in the chronological order in which it was recorded, and so gives you a feel of the flow of the event. Hopefully. http://www.ctrlshiftsummit.org.uk/

If you spend any time reading about the connection between education and the imagination, one name comes up repeatedly.  Kieran Egan has been writing about how to make education more imaginative since the 1980s, and has written many books on the subject.  Born in Ireland, he studied in London before moving to the US and then Canada where, as he puts it, “I got a job at Simon Fraser University in Canada, which has been the only job I’ve ever had”.  In recent years he has worked closely with Gillian Judson who we also spoke to in a previous post through the Imaginative Education Research Group.  He is now retired, and in case you’re wondering, the sound of running water in the background of this recording is not an indicator that Kieran was speaking to us from his bathtub, rather that he keeps a fishtank next to his desk.

While in Liege I visited Brasserie Coopérative Liégeoise, a co-operative brewery who make beers which source all their materials locally. Raphaël Lambois talked about the brewery and how it came about. Here is part of our conversation.

Pascal Hennen is the manager of Les Petits Producteurs, a fantastic shop opened in Liege as part of the Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise network of co-operatives. We caught up for a chat in the shop's back room. More about the shop at https://lespetitsproducteurs.be/

A conversation with Christian Jonet of Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise exploring the project's beginnings, evolution, and what it has led to. We were also trying to eat our supper at the same time, so you will need to excuse the restaurant noises in the background, and the occasional eating noises! Find out more at https://www.catl.be/.

Eric Holthaus was once called ‘The Rebel Nerd of Meteorology’ by Rolling Stone magazine and is a journalist who writes about climate change. In 2013, sitting at an airport, he burst into tears having just read the latest IPCC report, and took to Twitter to share the impact, as a scientist studying climate change, that this knowledge was having on him emotionally.

When looking through research into imagination, memory and the brain, one name that keeps appearing is that of Dan Schacter. We recently interviewed Donna Rose Addis on this podcast, and she and Dan often collaborate on research. Dan has been a Professor of Psychology in the Psychology Department in Harvard University since 1991, focusing mainly on memory, and more recently on the relationship between memory and imagination, using techniques from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. We chatted via Skype and I started by asking him if he might firstly introduce us to the hippocampus. If he was introducing it to someone at a party, who knew nothing about it, where would he start?

How does our relationship with digital technologies alter our relationship with the future, with the present, and with our imaginations? It’s a question we’ve reflected on in various podcasts and interviews in this series. One of the books that most influenced me on this was Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Present Shock’. Rushkoff is a writer, documentarian and lecturer, whose work focuses on human autonomy in a digital age.

If it is true that we are living through a time in which our collective imagination is increasingly devalued and undernourished, what might be the role of story in that, and how might story be part of the remedy?  There are few better people to discuss this with than Sarah Woods.  Sarah is a writer across all media and her work has been produced by many companies including the RSC, Hampstead and the BBC.

I don’t know about you, but most of my time at school did very little to foster my imagination. It tended to be viewed as though I had brought a naughty, troublesome friend to school with me, one not afraid to point out the absurdity of most of what we did, and of how we did it. In today’s education system, with its pressures from league tables, test results and uninspiring curricula, the imagination still struggles to be heard and valued. Fighting its corner, in Canada at least, is Gillian Judson.

As the research stage of the book I am writing on imagination wraps up, it was a real treat recently to chat to Donna Rose Addis, a Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Auckland. One of the areas I’ve been researching, as a complete novice to neuroscience, has been what happens in our brains when we imagine. I had read several papers she had written about the similarities between imagination and memory, our abilities to recall the past, and to imagine the future.

Adam Gazzaley is a neuroscientist, a photographer, an entrepreneur, an inventor, and an author.  He is a Professor at University of California, San Francisco, where he directs a centre called Neuroscape which both creates new technologies and also validate them as tools. He has authored over 100 scientific articles, and is co-author, with Dr. Larry Rosen, of 'The Distracted Mind'.  We chatted by Skype about attention and the imagination.

One of the most fascinating craft breweries in the UK can be found nestled in a series of arches beneath a railway bridge in Bermondsey in London. For the last 9 years, The Kernel, under the guidance of its founder Evin O’Rourke, have pioneered not just amazing and distinctive beers, but also an approach rooted in connection to place, to a different way of doing business. http://www.thekernelbrewery.com/

John McCarthy on the captive imagination by Rob Hopkins