Rob Hopkins

I recently put out a call looking for places, events or venues that are creating wifi-free spaces, places where people can intentionally get away from smartphones and the distraction they bring into our lives, some time to cultivate the attention. One of the suggestions I received was a café in Paris called ‘Télescope’. On a recent visit to the city I headed over to Télescope, a small but rather lovely café in the first Arrondissement, near the Louvre. It is a place which clearly cherishes coffee, and the art of creating it. It has been run for the past 7 years by Nicolas Clerc, who sat down with me in a quiet moment to tell me more about he came to be running a wi-fi-free café. I started by asking him whether the lack of wifi was deliberate?

Amy Seefeldt set up and runs the Centre for Imagination at an international boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas in India called Woodstock. As I begin exploring what education would look like if it were underpinned by imagination, and if young people emerged from it with their imaginations fully formed, empowered and vibrant, I was keen to hear her experience of creating, in effect, an outpost for the imagination within an existing school. Amy took a year out of teaching to study at Schumacher College, and her thesis, ‘Centring the Ecological Imagination’ documents her process of dreaming and planning the Centre for Imagination.

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.