From What If to What Next

Better what, I hear you ask? You're in for a treat as I introduce you to futurist and futures designer Monika Bielskyte. She is one of the world's boldest and most adventurous futures thinkers, so you are in for a treat as we dive deep into her concept of 'Protopian' thinking, and so much more. Prepare for a super workout for your imagination!

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Season's greetings to you! Here is your special Christmas day episode, appropriately focusing on the theme of compassion. Our guests are Jared Seide and Dr Ann Seide, whose work on compassion is amazing. To find out more about Centre for Council, click here. You might also enjoy this film about their "Cops & Communities: Circling Up" program, this one about LAPD officers talking about working with "council huddles" and a presentation Jared and Ann did for a cohort of Law Enforcement leaders on compassion training for police officers. I really hope you love this episode, and thanks so much for your love and support of this podcast during 2023. Have a great festive season.

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As you'll have spotted by now, we're never ones to shy away from asking a good big bold What If question. This week we are diving into the question of how different things would be if we were to rethink the scale on which we operate, and were to root ourselves more closely in nature's own boundaries. The bioregional movement was a big thing in the 1990s and faded away a bit, but is now back with a bang, and we speak to two of its key proponents, Erika Zarate and Daniel Christian Wahl to find out more. How would bioregionalism going mainstream change the world and how we look at it? This is a fascinating deep dive, and I hope you love it. As always, do let me know what you think... thanks!

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The British Ecological Society's REED Ecological Network (REED standing for Racial and Ethnic Equality and Diversity) was formed due to the very low levels of people of colour represented in the sector, and their feeling that "it's easy to feel alone when working in ecology, the environment and related fields like agriculture". My two guests this week, Bushra Schuitemaker and Reuben Fakoya-Brooks are both members, and in spite of working in quite different ecological sectors, are active founder members of this network. How did it start? What does it do? And how does it actively fire the imaginations of those involved? This is a beautiful episode, I hope you love it. As always, do let us know what you think.

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Jonathan Rhodes and Joanna Grover recently wrote a great book called 'The Choice Point' and work together as Imagery Coaching. They work with a wide range of organisations and individuals, building their capacity to be imaginative in a multisensory way. Naturally, their tools and their insights are highly relevant to the themes of this podcast given that, as bell hooks once put it, "what we cannot imagine cannot come into being". I hope you enjoy our conversation and that, at the end of it, your own imagination feels like it has had a good workout too! As always, thanks for listening and do let me know what you think, and thanks to Ben Addicott, Producer Supreme.

Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

On some of our 'decade' episodes (well, 50 and 80 anyway) we changed from our usual two guest format to an in-depth conversation with someone who represents one of the great practitioners of the radical imagination in our times. And so today, in keeping with that 'tradition', we mark Episode 90 with a one-to-one conversation with Aisha Shillingford, whose work I just love. She is Artistic Director at the fabulous Intelligent Mischief, whose work includes the fabulously-titled Secret Society of Black Utopians. She wrote a brilliant article recently in Yes! magazine which I highly recommend. What a delight and an honour to be able to sit and talk imagination with her. I hope you love it, and as always, do let me know what you think.

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This week I'm joined by Aimee Lewis Reau and LaUra Schmidt, authors of 'How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet'. They are also co-founders of the beautifully named Good Grief Network. Aimee also DJs under the name eXis10shAL (I mention in the episode that I would spell it here as it was too time-consuming to spell it out on the podcast). We had a fascinating discussion about their 10 Steps to Resilience and Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate model, about imagination, and about the inner skills we need for the challenges ahead. I hope you love it. Do let me know what you think.

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This is a wonderful conversation. It's a deep dive into a powerful reimagining of who our energy system serves, and what it might look like. My two guests are both people who have given this a lot of thoughts. Elaine McMillion Sheldon is an Academy Award-nominated, Peabody-winning, and two-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. Her most recent film is the utterly brilliant 'King Coal' (see the trailer here). Rosemary Harris, from Platform, was part of the creation of the recent 'Our Power' report, which you can read here. I hope you enjoy this discussion and the possibilities it will open up in your imagination.

Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Welcome to one of those episodes of From What If to What Next that really gets under your skin. We are going to step out of our everyday commonplace universe and enter the parallel world of fungi that lives all around us, and really creates the world we live in. It's a pretty wild ride. And I have two amazing guests for you, who will hold our hands on our deep dive into this fascinating world. Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum, and her forthcoming book has possibly the best title I have ever heard which I'm not going to tell you so it can be a delightful surprise. And Doug Bierend is a New York based writer and author of the fab In Search of Mycotopia. I think you're going to like this one.

As always, thanks for listening, thanks to Ben Addicott for sprinkling his audio gold dust over the whole affair, and do share your thoughts, it's lovely to know what you think. Thanks.

When it comes to work that celebrates the radical imagination, Jayna Brown's recent book Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds is one of the most fascinating that I've read recently. Jayna is professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, and for this episode she is joined by Kevin Quashie, who teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. Together they take us on a deep dive into our What If question for this week and into many areas of discussion.

It was such an honour to be joined by Jayna and Kevin for this episode. I hope you enjoy it, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.