by Kirsty Heron and Tom Deacon

Recorded by authors

Introduction

This essay emerged following a Work That Reconnects Network webinar on how to build global connections supporting climate activism through the Work That Reconnects (WTR). Drawing on our experience with Just Stop Oil, Insulate Britain, Extinction Rebellion and global activists during COP26 in Glasgow, we share how we are supporting movements for climate justice in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England (W.I.S.E.).

We’d like to name here that we are operating within the social and political context of this particular place in the world, and acknowledge that activism might look very different where you live. In many countries, to take to the streets and protest in the ways that these climate campaigns do would be to come up against massive amounts of state, corporate and police oppression that can be violent – even fatal. Here, the state is introducing new laws that erode civil liberties and the right to protest peacefully, directly impacting activists in the movements we are part of. At the time of writing (December 2022), 100 climate activists are in prison in the UK.

Of course you might be fortunate enough to live in a place where the right to protest is protected; we celebrate that and hope that you can use these liberties to pressure the decision-makers in your country to act now for a future that includes all life.

Although these stories are personal, we are also telling the stories of the collectives we have the honour of being part of – collaborations with facilitators of the Work that Reconnects whose dedication and care have helped make this possible. This is an evolving story, one story among many in the Great Turning, and so we write this with a curiosity of what it might inspire in you.

Although a first look at offering the Work That Reconnects within these campaign groups might suggest attention to just one of the three dimensions of activism – “Holding Actions” – we are also exploring how it can be part of “Building the New” and “Shift in Consciousness”. We have brought WTR into direct action spaces, resilience building workshops and ceremonies amidst thousands of people. In this way, the WTR is helping to shape different ways of organising and growing community within these campaigns, as well as supporting regenerative cultures to develop and emerge within activist organising.

Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion is a global movement with a focus on using nonviolent mass civil disobedience to force urgent action on the climate and ecological emergency. Its “Three Demands” are: “Tell the Truth”, “Act Now”, “Decide Together”. 

Our journey began in 2019 during a two week Extinction Rebellion (XR) protest in London. Prior to the Rebellion, a small group of WTR facilitators had been organising a schedule of workshops to take place at various designated locations in the streets that were to be occupied by XR protestors. Most of us didn’t know each other; it was all organised online. We had times, dates and co-facilitators all lined up yet, the reality turned out to be somewhat different. The police put pressure on all the occupied encampments in the streets, and the venues in which we had hoped to offer our workshops didn’t exist. As a responsive self-organising – and determined – system, we adapted. Meeting as buddy pairs in the middle of giant, noisy crowds to plan a workshop outline, we grabbed a microphone and invited people to join us in a small tent where a group was gathered to move through a short “Spiral” of the Work. This connective conversation touched into the gratitude and grief that brought people out of their homes and onto the streets. More accustomed to running workshops with clear and calm boundaries, of times and locations and even participants, we learned a lot about adapting to rapidly changing, dynamic, and often chaotic situations.

We’ve also brought ceremony to the streets of London. In 2020, on a tidal beach of the River Thames in London, a “Council of All Beings” was held at low tide, police watching curiously over the walkway wall. Bringing the voices of other beings into the midst of an intense period of nonviolent direct action, we honoured the voice of the river itself through integrating a “bowl of tears” ritual that then flowed back into the river. The motto for that rebellion was “flow like water”…a fluid response to the policing tactics used previously to disable the protest through confiscating all infrastructure. In October 2022, during an XR Youth Climate March in London, a facilitator of the Work led 1000 people in an “Active Hope Spiral”, inviting people to connect in threes using sentence starters. The shift in energy was palpable as people turned to their neighbours and shared some of their deeper motivations for being there. This inspired a whole crowd of people to tune into their hopeful visions of the future!

Insulate Britain & Just Stop Oil

These two campaigns identify as enacting nonviolent civil resistance, building pressure for specific political action relating to the climate crisis. Insulate Britain, using high level disruption of major motorways in the UK, brought its demand of insulating Britain’s social housing. Just Stop Oil, through a range of disruption tactics including targeting oil infrastructure, roads, and high profile art/sport, has challenged the British government to halt all new oil and gas licences. 

We are involved with a team called Resilience to Resist that offers, among other kinds of emotional and practical support, workshops called “Building Trust and Courage” online for Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain activists. These use the Spiral of the WTR as a backbone. For the past 18 months, activists in these movements have been able to access these workshops once, twice, or sometimes three times a week when there is a build-up in preparation for actions. We have also offered day-long workshops of the WTR this winter across the regions of Wales, England, and Scotland. These are community-building gatherings where we can meet in person, share food, stories, tears and laughter. 

The regularity of these offerings means that “Active Hope” is practised in community and can support and inform the way that a movement resources itself. In climate activism, as with other activism there is a tendency for people to give and give to a point where they are empty – we call this “burnout” and it is increasingly common as the urgency of the climate situation grows. We see that the Work can help to mitigate burnout, through the sharing of feelings of both gratitude and grief, finding a wider sense of community by seeing other people, other groups and nature as allies, and also reframing activism in the context of the three dimensions of the Great Turning.

One result of introducing the WTR into these climate campaigns has been that we’ve received quite a few requests for training and skill-sharing from participants who can see the value in the work and would like to bring it to their local groups. We were fortunate enough to receive some funding to develop a training we called “Active Hope for Activists”. With a lot of gratitude to the Emergence Foundation for supporting this project, we appreciated the opportunity to gather with a group of 12 committed activists spanning both climate and social justice campaigns to share skills in facilitation of this work and how to offer it in activist spaces. 

COP26

COP 26, the UN climate talks held in Glasgow in November 2021, encompassed a whole lot more than simply a meeting of government officials, scientists, and of course the corporate lobbyists. At the same time that these talks were happening, a festival of climate consciousness was taking place across the city with tens of thousands of people engaged in creative conversations, workshops, music, art, film, poetry, and protest. 

At one of the civil society opening ceremonies, we were part of a facilitation team that offered a “Council of All Beings” as part of a beautiful ceremony that included people from La Minga Indigena, a collective of indigenous nations from across the Americas. Minga is the coming together of people when there is a calling. Indeed, at COP26, many of us had followed a calling to add our voices to the protests against the continued exploitation of people and planet and the selling off of the future–to the demands on global nation state leaders to take action on climate and for the richer nations to pay loss and damage to those least responsible for climate change yet the most vulnerable to its impacts. In unifying our visions and hopes with others, we sought to generate determination, resilience and more love in action.

A collective of 7 facilitators offered Work that Reconnects workshops every day for two weeks in a community garden sanctuary space. The schedule included introductory workshops, as well as sessions dedicated to truth telling and honouring pain, mitigating for burnout and the three dimensions of activism (the “Great Turning”), listening to the voices of the more than human world with a “Council of All Beings”, resourcing ourselves with Deep Time, visioning the future we wish to create, shifting to Seventh Generation perspectives, and a deeply grounding session on “Gratitude”. Furthermore, as WTR network collaborators with the makers of the film Once You Know, we screened the film in a city centre venue and offered a post screening Work that Reconnects experience in-person with global climate activists. 

Learning from other fluid protest situations, we also took the opportunity to draw on the Work that Reconnects to either deescalate tense situations, or generate connection in moments of frustration or despondency. During a tense moment of protest outside an exclusive dinner for world leaders, there was an opportunity to take the microphone briefly to invite everyone to connect with someone next to them (in a dark rainy Glasgow park) and share an appreciation, frustration, inspiration and next-step relating to the situation they were in. The darkness exploded into a cacophony of connective chatter. A few days later, still in the rain, outside the high metal fence of the official negotiation space, many people gathered as the COP faltered toward a messy end. The feelings of despair and frustration were evident. Here small connective conversations were initiated, bringing people together to connect and to voice their feelings, again using the “Spiral” stages as an informal structure, to build connection and process the moment.

Conclusion

We have seen how the WTR is a body of work that supports deeper understanding of community within a campaign, and offers a way to build and explore regenerative cultures within and beyond the movement. The adaptability of the practices mean that it can be offered in wild nature, in sanctuary spaces in a city, and on the streets, and that regular offerings and practise of the Work strengthen resilience and demonstrate a different way to organise, relate, and take action together. 

What might this look like where you live?

We’d love to continue this dialogue with other facilitators of the Work that Reconnects. If any of you are already offering WTR in activist spaces, then perhaps we can share more ideas and resources? Also, if you are curious and inspired to engage more with climate activist groups where you live, then please do get in touch and contact us at [email protected]

________________

Links:

Extinction Rebellion: https://rebellion.global/

Insulate Britain: https://insulatebritain.com/

Just Stop Oil: https://juststopoil.org/

Resources:

Love, Rage, Rebel: Climate Activism and the Great Turning – WTR Webinar and Conversation Cafe Series Webinar

Three Dimensions of Activism – WTR definitions of activism

Walks That Reconnect – WTR-inspired series of interactive audio walks developed for activists

Contact: [email protected]

---

Recorded by Erin Holtz

Kirsty Heron: I am a wanderer of Earth, currently making my home either amongst the mosses of the temperate rainforest of Scotland’s west coast, or on an organic market garden in mid Scotland, getting to know all things about perennial fruit.  I love beauty, wildness, generosity and passion. My work, my life, is dedicated to connecting people with information, ideas and experiences that can shift perspectives and lead to action on behalf of life on Earth. Being part of collaborative networks of people that encourage, support and empower each other is a gift in my life.

 

Recorded by Erin Holtz

Tom Deacon feels most at home immersed in the elementals of mountain and coast. He draws great inspiration from weaving and facilitating lived experiences in wild places with the transformative processes of the Work that Reconnects. As a mountain guide, climate trainer, group facilitator, and activist it is in the entanglement of the web where all these elements of his life meet that he feels most alive. Tom is enlivened by being a part of generative networks of humans, by growing vegetables in collaboration with the soil and sun, and by leaping into the arms of cold water.

by Linda J. Chase

Recorded by author

Teaching music students from around the world has reinforced my belief that music connects people across borders and traditions. It has also shown me the urgent need to not only integrate social justice education into musical arts curriculum, but also to provide artfully relevant methods for students to practice active hope during these turbulent times. 

How can educators address the anxiety and feelings of helplessness that the climate crisis triggers in many young people? Students feel the burden that their generation will have to bear and are hungry to engage in honest dialogue. They are curious to discover how artists are speaking out about environmental justice issues. To educate for social change and inspire action through the arts, it is important to encourage students to respond to concerns using their artistic language. I find that Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnston, provides a structure for emerging musicians to grapple with their fears and articulate a vision of hope. This kind of hope is not a possession, but a practice. Just like music, we practice and grow. 

My students at Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory engage with the Spiral through songwriting, improvisation and other sounding activities. One exercise we do is a musically recreated “Industrial Walk” (a reenactment of ‘industrial society’ and ‘business as usual’ practiced at WTC workshops). This exercise requires participants to mill around the room without looking at one another. Gradually they begin to make eye contact and join with that person for discussion. To practice this musically, students mill around the room playing their instruments (flutes, violins, guitars, and voices) but avoid eye contact with each other and listen only to their own sounds. Eventually they are drawn rhythmically, melodically or harmonically to another musician, and join together for discussion. 

Listening to Earth’s songs of joy and of suffering has greatly influenced my musical life. Wild geese call, inviting reverence. The river sings of resilience. Uranium mining scrapes trauma on sacred land. Desecration is heard in the dumping of nuclear waste on Indigenous lands, causing dire consequences to all species. Joanna’s work around nuclear guardianship showed me the importance of comprehending and speaking out against the dangers of nuclear catastrophe. 

But being close to disaster makes a difference. On March 11, 2011, I heard the Earth cry out.

Sixty miles from Fukushima during the Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown the train shook to a stop, altering my path forever. We filed out of the derailed train and walked to the next town. The streets were dark without electricity, roads were closed and phones didn’t work. That night, sleeping on the floor of a middle school gym–turned shelter, still feeling many large aftershocks, I took refuge in The Ink Dark Moon, a book of thousand-year-old poems by Izumi Shikibu and Ono no Komachi, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani. These poems sustained me and led to write music about the resilience of a 400-year old pine tree growing on the coast of Fukushima that survived the tsunami. 

This pine tree by the rock
Must have its memories too
After a thousand years,
See how its branches
Lean towards the ground.
               (Ono no Komachi, in Hirshfield, 1990)

After returning home to Boston, a friend shared the book, Pass It On (Macy, 2010), which helped me process my experience. The chapter on Chernobyl describes a workshop that Joanna and her team led in the town Novozbkov (100 miles from Chernobyl). She wrote about a man who told her, “the trees hold the radioactivity a long time. And that is very hard for us because, you see, our ancestors were of the forest, our old stories are of the forest.” Much can be learned from cultures that look to ancestors for guidance, remembering that we all will be ancestors to future generations, and actions chosen today will affect generations to come. These insights and the exercises from “A Larger View of Time” in Active Hope explained the ancestral connection I felt with the poets from the ancient court of Japan.

Several years after the earthquake, I was grateful to attend a Work That Reconnects training at the Rowe Center in Western Massachusetts. The conversations from that training deepened my understanding of the Spiral and Joanna’s words remained in my heart, “If we are afraid to feel the grief, rage and fear about our world we become stuck, but can begin with gratefulness and move towards an active hope.” In response, I composed a 90-minute multi-media oratorio The City is Burning. Inspired both by the Spiral, and insights by theologian, Harvey Cox. The music reflects on what it means to listen to the quiet voice of the soul and asks how feelings of uneasiness might invite an awakening from inaction to a place of action. 

Responding to the concept of Honoring Our Pain, this song spilled out with tears for the state of our world. “Lift Me Up” illustrates the process of awakening to respond to injustice through active hope. The tears never end, the spiral continues. 

Lift me up, I’ve been down so long I can’t arise. 
Wake me up, I fell asleep because I chose to close my eyes. 
You promised peace, you promised hope at least so I must start walking to see. 
Shake me up, I wanna hear the voices that cannot speak. 
Take away, my sense of fear that keeps me numb and weak. 
The tears never end but they melt my heart again so we can be the light!
Lift me up, so I can raise my voice and join in the song. 
Wake me up, there’s many ways to make a world where all can belong. 
We can make peace if we decide to be, standing together to be free. 
Shake me up, so I can feel the life all around. 
Take away, what isn’t real so I can hear the sound. 
The song of the land, a music that understands that we can be the light!
Don’t be afraid of your light! (1)

In the performance of The City is Burning, the song, “Just Remember Your Light” is preceded by a reading of this Joanna Macy quote: “Active Hope is not wishful thinking…it is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act… The web of life is calling us forth at this time. We’ve come a long way and are here to play our part.” (Joanna Macy)

Seeing with new eyes, the singers step into the aisles. Facing audience, they sing:

You don’t have to be right, you don’t have to be strong. 
You don’t have to know which way to go when the road is long. 
You don’t have to be wise, just keep open your eyes!
You don’t have to know the way, you don’t have to know why.
You don’t have to feel like being brave, in the rising tide.
You don’t have to be wise, just keep open your eyes!
When the nights’ growing long, and you’re feeling so cold.
Just keep singing your song and you won’t be alone.
Just remember your light will keep shining through the darkest of nights.
Just remember your light! (2)

My most recent large scale composition is another oratorio, For Our Common Home – Resounding Ecojustice inspired by the encyclical Laudato Si. Based on a canticle of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis addresses not only people of faith, but everyone on earth, calling on humanity to acknowledge the urgency of the environmental crisis and work toward building a just and sustainable world. The message focuses on working together across all divisions, to mend and care for our common home. Laudato Si’ calls us to be compassionate and to take action – going forth – reminding me again of the Work That Reconnects. I interpret the text as a call to action through music.

Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it. (Pope Francis, 2015)

One of the 23 movements in my new oratorio is titled, “Gratitude.” While composing this movement, I realized that it had grown from seeds planted by the Spiral years before.  Circling around, I conclude with gratitude.

In gratitude and affirmation
The work of solidarity
The sacrifices taken to heal the suffering
So hate and fear may cease, may cease to be
Who work for justice: root of peace
With tireless devotion build community
Who seek to restore
Resolve the causes of suffering 
Rebuild our common home
Reveal the common soul
In gratitude we speak
Proclaiming equity
Faith is turning dreams to deeds 
The urgency of healing needs
A dialogue for all to speak till all are free (3)

(The last three lines of the song Gratitude refer to famous quotes by Clarence Jordan and Martin Luther King Jr. “Faith is the turning of dreams into deeds,” Clarence Jordan. “We are not free until all are free,” Martin Luther King, Jr.)

---

Notes & Links

(1) Words and music by Linda J. Chase
Nedelka Prescod, voice, Anna Unchu Pyon, piano
https://soundcloud.com/lchase-1/lift-me-up

(2) Words and music by Linda J. Chase
Sarah Matsushima, voice, Pavle Zvekik. piano 
https://on.soundcloud.com/oy2w1

(3)Words and music by Linda J. Chase
Stuart Ryerse, piano, 
Carduus Chamber Choir
https://on.soundcloud.com/yuFAp
More music from the oratorio: 
https://www.lindajchase.com/projects-7

References

Hirshfield, J. Aratani, M. (1990) The Ink Dark Moon: Love poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan. Vintage Books.

Macy, J. Johnstone, C. (2012) Active Hope: How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy. New World Library

Pope Francis. (2015) Encyclical on climate change and inequality: On care for our common home. Melville House

---

Recorded by Rebecca Selove

Composer / flutist Linda J. Chase teaches at Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory. Her music weaves elements of classical, jazz, and gospel, blending boundaries between musical worlds. Her music often focuses on themes of peace and justice, striving to create art that will have a positive impact in the world. She founded and directs the Peace and Justice Arts Café concert series, joining music students with local communities to invite dialogue and demonstrate the arts as a vehicle for social change. Chase recently completed a 23-movement oratorio for ecojustice, For Our Common Home, based on Laudato Si’.

---

By Eileen Laurie

recorded by author

A researcher makes a mask of a Brazilian bird with feathers from a city park; next to him another researcher wonders how to portray a cloud; on the floor at the back of the room, a third researcher turns art materials into the nitrogen molecule. Just an ordinary day in academia?

I would like to present the workshop I led in October 2022 at Lund University, Sweden, developed from an invitation from Christie Nicoson, PhD student at Lund University’s Agenda 2030 Graduate School. I had discussed my work as an artist with her, and we also spoke about sustainability, art and care and academic teaching and research. The workshop – Visioning an imperfect yet possible future: Art-based methods for sustainability researchers – was developed from these discussions. The participants in the workshop came from different disciplines, departments and fields. The goal was to learn new methods, try out new approaches, and to open the mind and stretch the imagination through the practice of experiential and embedded artistic activities. 

I am an artist and educator and my art practice is inspired by the natural world and how people interact with this world and with each other. In my art education work with children, youth and adults, I encourage creativity, dialogue and connection, situating art-making within the context of our lived world. Like every visual artist, my art practice is about looking and really seeing what is around me. Today, this unavoidably means seeing a world that seems to be careening out of control. The latest report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022) from February 2022, was unequivocal in its findings on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. It does not look good. 

Yet even the academics working in the fields of climate change and sustainability can find themselves stuck in certain patterns of behaviour and ways of thinking that hinder necessary change. The project SUSPLACE, Sustainable Place-shaping notes that “innovations for sustainability researchers often stay within a narrow comfort zone” and that “more unconventional ideas and action plans evoke discomfort or resistance”. Working with visual art can help to push the pause button and create a space for reflection, creation and action. The design of my Visioning workshop embedded art-making practices within the spiral of the Work that Reconnects and aimed to create a space for just such “unconventional ideas” and where “discomfort and resistance” could become points of departure, and not dead-ends.

After more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, social isolation and a complete change in my working practices with a lot of online interaction and not much human-to-human connection, I was more than ready to facilitate a group process again, but also a bit nervous. My aim was to deliver a workshop that would be relevant to academia, with its specific codes, structures and unspoken rules. The participants were highly-educated and well-versed in scholarly debate, and obviously open to my proposal, as they had signed up for the workshop. My task was to facilitate the spiral in a way that made sense to them. 

How would things pan out for a group of people working with these methods together for the first time? 

Would they learn from embedded practices, or find it all too “touchy-feely”? 

I knew an important task was to create a “group container” for active listening, honest exchange, reflection and hands-on work (Lakey, 2020). To do this I would have to find the right pace and rhythm, and have a clear understanding myself about why I was working with specific practices and what I wanted to achieve. Any workshop, no matter what design or methods it builds upon, benefits from moving between ebb and flow, between speech and silence, between sharing and quiet reflection. My aim was to offer art-based and embedded activities that nonetheless converged into a coherent whole, and could be adapted by the participants for future use. 

The workshop was in three parts – a full-day workshop, two self-organised activities and a half-day workshop. We began on an uncommonly warm autumn day in October; maybe it was just “weather”; maybe it was a portent of something else – I decided to simply enjoy the feeling of the sun on my face. The very simple art materials – paper, scissors, glue, wool, feathers, modelling clay, etc. – were set up on a dedicated table, an “art invitation” typical of the Reggio Emilia approach (Reggio Children, 2022). To begin, I chose a simple and playful ice-breaker, a “convening” exercise of drawing stencils of our hands (The Re.imaginary Group, 2020). The activity linked us to ancient artists and set the tone for the entire workshop – not working with screens, not only with abstract concepts (as important as they are), but instead – hands-on.

I then introduced the Work that Reconnects and the entire spiral, explaining that we would begin with Coming from gratitude and continue through three more stages. We began with a guided meditation that focused on all the senses. The participants then spoke in pairs about what they were thankful for. The energy in the room felt light and open; the participants were really willing to talk.

We moved on to Honouring our pain for the world. I introduced the idea of working with our feelings of pain and grief with what I call the “litany of misery”, the endless, soul-crushing list of what is already lost and cannot be repaired, but must be faced. We then worked with open sentences, journaling and a group reflection. Having gone through the spiral many times, I have come to understand that grief for the world comes from love for and connection to this world. Yet Honouring our pain always seems too soon, too hard. All I could do was trust the process and continue. Despite my misgivings, the researchers did talk about their fears and the ways they avoided them, and the discomfort experienced. Before beginning the sharing activities, I emphasised that everyone had the freedom to decide how much and what to share, but in retrospect I realise that I need to be more explicit in future that “what we say in the room, stays in the room”. 

After lunch, as we moved into Seeing the world with new eyes; it was time for the more-than-human world to enter the room. We began with an interview with nature, adapted from Deep Nature Play by the inspiring nature educator Joseph Cornell (Cornell, 2018). Working in pairs, the participants took on the role of a rock, natural feature or an animal. This led into the next activity – choosing to be a more-than-human being and creating a mask to represent this for the Council of All Beings. One participant commented that the mask-making and the Council meant she was not just “left alone” with painful emotions of the morning, but could process them through practical and creative activity. I thanked her and said this was part of the spiral’s design. And made a note to myself to remember what I had just said!

I felt that the full ceremonial version of the Council of All Beings was not suitable for this specific academic environment and time available. During the mask-making session, the participants very quickly had a clear idea of the being they wanted to represent and what the mask would look like. The simple art materials were used in a great variety of inventive ways – at the end, we had masks representing clouds, nitrogen, snails, blue-throated macaws and much more.

For the Council the participants sat in groups of four and each person had time to talk about the powers and perspectives of their more-than-human being, about relationships with other beings and the problems caused by humans. The next stage was to offer suggestions to humans on how to take better care of the planet, our shared home. Active listening is absolutely key in this type of activity, and as I walked around listening to the Councils, it struck me how rarely we do this in our everyday lives:

How often do we just listen, not just take turns until we can finally say what we want to say? 

We wrapped up the first day of the workshop with self-organisation: the participants set up meetings to create a mind-map of Malmö, the third-largest city in Sweden to prepare for the stage of Going forth. The mind-map drew on the work of Transition UK (Hopkins, 2022), and asked three questions: 

What do you want to keep? What do you want to give up? And what needs to be repaired?

I also requested that the participants try a nature activity known as the sit spot, and that they spend at least 30 minutes alone in a natural environment and focus on really seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting what was around them.

Just over a week later we met again, for a morning session on Going forth. To bring the ideas from the mind-map to life, the participants developed three sketches off the cuff, and acted them out: keep, give up, repair. It was very entertaining; the participants very quickly came up with great ideas and used the physical space, gesture and story to bring the city to life. And I was faced again with my own discomfort; I had been worried that drama activities would be “too much”, but the invention, humour and intelligence of the participant-actors made it clear that I was mistaken. I will include more playful acting exercises in the next workshop I facilitate! We moved on to create our vision of an imperfect but possible Malmö in 2050. I asked the participants to consider questions like:

What if we took play seriously?  What if we followed nature’s lead?  What if we slowed down? 

The groups first discussed the kind of future they wanted. Using a large paper map of Malmö, they then built their vision with tape, stickers, pens and modelling clay. They reimagined a slower, more caring city, with, for example, no cars, canals throughout for transport and pleasure, food production on land and sea, and even large areas for humans and animals to play. The visions were presented and the discussions continued. It was an engaged and creative process. And, again, there was a learning for me: truly imagining a better future takes time. A longer session would have enabled more preparatory activities to help the participants unleash their imagination to dream the future. Yet in the short time we had, the visions were impressive and inspiring.

And then, all too soon, it was time to finish. The closing circle was brief but generous. These participants work every day with ideas and concepts, problems and solutions. They brought their knowledge and verbal eloquence with them; we built on this with activities rarely found in seminar rooms. Qualitative inquiry and the “messy” art-based, experimental and affective methodology applied in this workshop can generate and enable new ways of understanding and articulating subjectivity. Knowledge about the perilous state of our planet is one thing, the workshop took the participants beyond this “knowing”. They not only thought more broadly about what kind of world they wanted to live in and how to bring about this world. They also participated in embedded, experiential learning that could be adapted for both teaching and qualitative research.  

Designing a workshop that made sense and also tested boundaries was a very enjoyable challenge for me, and one I look forward to again in the future. I also received detailed and insightful written feedback from the participants that will enrich my next workshop. I hope very much that the participants will have the opportunity to apply their learning from this experience in ways that are meaningful to their own research practice. 

I am going to end with a link to a poem by Kathleen Jamie, a poem from my home country of Scotland – a reflection on what the more-than-human world thinks of our conferences and talks and directives and agreements. Enjoy!

What the Clyde said, after COP 26, Kathleen Jamie
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/what-the-clyde-said-after-cop26

---

References

Cornell, J. B. (2018). Deep nature play: A guide to wholeness, aliveness, creativity, and inspired learning. Crystal Clarity Publishers.

Hopkins, R. (2022). From what if to what next. From What If to What Next. Retrieved November 27, 2022, from https://fromwhatiftowhatnext.libsyn.com

IPCC. (2022, February 28). Climate change: A threat to human wellbeing and health of the planet. taking action now can secure our future. IPCC. Retrieved November 26, 2022, from https://www.ipcc.ch/2022/02/28/pr-wgii-ar6

Lakey, G. (2020). Facilitating Group Learning: Strategies for success with diverse learners. PM Press.

Pearson, K. R., Bäckman, M., Grenni, S., Moriggi, A., Pisters, S., & de Vrieze, A. (2018). Arts-based methods for transformative engagement: A toolkit. SUSPLACE. https://doi.org/10.18174/441523

Reggio Children. (2022). Reggio Emilia Approach. Reggio Children. Retrieved November 27, 2022, from https://www.reggiochildren.it/en/reggio-emilia-approach

The Re.imaginary Group. (2020). Reimaginary – re-imagining possibilities for just and ecological societies. The Reimaginary Group. Retrieved November 26, 2022, from https://www.reimaginary.com

---

Recorded by Evangelia Papoutsaki

Eileen Laurie is an artist and art educator. Born in Scotland, Eileen has a Master of Arts degree from Glasgow University and has studied fine art in Northern Ireland and Sweden. Her art practice focuses on the more-than-human world and its interactions with humans. Eileen creates illustrations, prints, textile work and Land Art. In art education work, she works in schools, universities, and different communities, creating a space for creativity, dialogue, and connection. The Work that Reconnects has been part of her life since 2009, and Eileen looks forward to facilitating many more workshops following the spiral.