Re-visioning #7: A conversation with Loes Damhof
This is the seventh in a roving and open-ended series of conversations in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, in March 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty of the present moment, I find myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations are part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain, an act of deep listening. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
Loes Damhof holds a UNESCO Chair in Futures Literacy at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences. Besides researching the impact of Futures Literacy as a capability, she develops and facilitates so-called Futures Literacy Laboratories: collective intelligence knowledge creation processes across the globe that challenge and raise fundamental questions on gender equality, decolonization, migration, climate change and technology. Her next project is The Emergence Academy; new school for new activism, that offers leaders who are young at heart an alternative learning environment that fosters a new, embracing attitude towards complexity and uncertainty. You can read more of Loes’s thinking and writing here.
IN: Loes, we met through Bayo Akomolafe’s ‘We Will Dance With Mountains’ course that we both did over the tail end of 2020 and the beginning of this year. This conversation has come about because I’m in the process of making work that is, or started out as being, about the future, and your work is also about the future, or more precisely futures, as we’ll find out. So, maybe let’s start by having you explain a bit about what Futures Literacy involves.
LD: So Futures Literacy is a capability, a skill, or a competency but you could also call it a mindset. It’s about imagining multiple diverse futures and using them to look at the present with a different set of eyes. We often use the past to give meaning to the present but we can also use futures. We talk about the future as singular — building, planning for, surviving the future — but there are endless possibilities, so why think of only one? Also, if we are only imagining one future for ourselves, then that informs our decision making in the present. While it gives us something to work towards, it doesn’t take account of the complexity or uncertainty that exists, or for any of the things we cannot predict. So it’s pretty narrow, right? Futures Literacy is a way to practice imaginative skills, and to understand the sources of our hopes and fears. By doing that, we can interrogate our assumptions about the future and begin to open ourselves up for emergence and uncertainty in the hope that we become less fearful.
IN: Well, we could spin off in any direction, but what I find immediately encouraging and thought-provoking about Futures Literacy is the plurality that’s built into the model. It chimes with something I’ve been thinking about, which is that however much we know that a concept like climate collapse, for example, is real and multi-faceted, it’s difficult not to be faced with the terrifying and overwhelming single notion that those two words represent. And that, in turn, leads to a perceived certainty in the reception of it that doesn’t allow for the nuanced response that it requires, from everyone. The risk then is that, for someone who isn’t already on board, it looks like someone else’s future.
LD: A colonized future.
IN: So then what happens is people don’t get involved because it looks like you have to subscribe to this monolithic and indisputable vision of what the future holds. Whereas, if we ask, ‘what futures can we imagine in the context of climate collapse?’, that immediately feels more compelling.
LD: We use the term ‘poverty of imagination’ a lot and it comes from exactly this notion of being fed visions of the future, colonized futures as I say. Elon Musk says this, Google tells us that, governments tell us what will happen by 2030 etcetera. So we hold events and workshops that we call laboratories where we encourage people to share futures and build collective intelligence. I can imagine my own futures but it really stretches my imagination to hear other peoples’ futures too. The other thing that we do is to try and decolonize futures by asking people to interrogate their own visions of the future and ask, together, where those images come from, because we find that everyone has the same images more or less, wherever they are in the world. Images of the future are culturally very narrow. What we would like to see are futures that do justice to the diversity and complexity of the world, and we’re nowhere near that. So it’s a really important skill.
IN: I have some questions that are springing up that come from both what you’ve said and what I’ve read. I might just fire some connected questions at you and see what emerges if that’s ok?
LD: Sure.
IN: So I wanted to ask you a bit about the history of the movement, where it comes from, and what are the assumptions of Futures Literacy? I think what I’m getting at is trying to understand whether it’s a renegade strategy, whether it comes from within the system, so to speak, whether it straddles the both, and what are the inherent tensions? Maybe a good question is what happens if you apply the methodologies of Futures Literacy to Futures Literacy itself?
LD: Ha, ok, good question. Let’s see. Riel Miller is the founder. He is an economist by training, and spent a long time studying how people use futures and developing something he called ‘the framework of anticipation’. He then went to UNESCO, where he started to apply these capabilities through laboratories and workshops. Of course working with futures is not new, but Futures Literacy is the newest addition to the field, because you look at futures by breaking down assumptions about futures in the present. By examining those assumptions we can become a lot more open in what we sense in the present. So, as well as planning and preparation, we are also using futures to be open to emergence in the present, which means to be open to phenomena, thoughts, or events that you did not prepare for. The idea that you can using the future for emergence is a bit disruptive in the big tent of futures studies, so yes, there is a sense in which it is a renegade in that field. There’s also a sense in which it challenges the status quo and disrupts assumptions. An example: When I asked Google employees what they predict the responses were all about super hi-tech innovation, of course, so then I asked about desirable futures, and people talked about going back to nature, living off-grid and didn’t talk about technology at all. So what people want has nothing to do with Google glasses and everything to do with living in harmony and being loved. We anticipate and make decisions based on prediction and not on hope.
IN: And then you start to get tensions appearing as a result of these divergences, presumably?
LD: Yes, because people have stepped out of the systems or institutions or corporations to envisage other possibilities and then they have to step back in. It’s like if you go exploring caves, and then find yourself back in the city, holding a rope and a flashlight — what are you going to do with them? So while I don’t think that a couple of hours workshop is going to change the world, I do think it gives us tools to explore our attitudes to the future. Most people would agree that we need to change, I think, inside and outside these big systems, we just don’t know how to go about it. It’s difficult, it’s uncertain and its uncomfortable but it’s absolutely necessary and I think that this capability gives a starting point for these conversations. It allows us to be more comfortable in the liminal spaces that have been opened up by Covid, for example, and more open to emergences that have arisen out of this situation.
IN: I wanted to take a slightly different route for the moment, if we can, and talk about how this work might address different groups of people, because I know you have very broad experience in terms of the kind of people you work with. Seven years ago, a few of us here in Sheffield set up Open Kitchen Social Club, an organisation which addresses food and social poverty amongst migrants and wider populations by cooking and sharing food on a weekly basis. One of the things I don’t really do is talk to people about the future, because for many it’s so precarious as to be impossible to make any plans at all, even in the short term. People tell me they have no future, and this is because of a very real sense in which the UK government keeps people in stateless limbo through its ‘hostile environment’ policy. I know someone who, for example, has been in and out of the asylum system for seventeen years. So when someone says they have no future, I understand why they say that.
LD: I recently did some advisory work with Syrian refugee families living in Lebanon, not about the whole future of Syria, but around the future of returning to Syria. What emerged were some very different ways that the parents were imagining a return to their lives in Syria, whereas the kids were seeing that everything is different now, and not necessarily imagining returning. It was leading to different perceptions of the hierarchy of family life, so how individuals were imaging the future was having a huge impact on the life of the family in the present. By working together to challenge those assumptions of the future, we were able to create space for conversation and understanding. That’s a very small example of a much more intimate setting where families can use futures to re-think relationships. So to go back to your question, even if people don’t feel that they have a future, they still have images and assumptions based on the future, they still anticipate. I would say that this work is potentially transformative, so a learning space like that is delicate and requires care and openness.
IN: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the transformative potential of uncertainty and the question of how to be decisive in a framework of uncertainty. I do wonder if people whose lives have been utterly displaced, and those who are lifelong experts in living with uncertainty, might be better educators than those who currently make decisions on our behalf, particularly as the global situation becomes more uncertain in so many ways. It also leads me onto another question that I’ve got, which is that if we extend the frame of experience that we’re interested in even further and start to think about more-than-human sensibilities, or if we take, for example, a different cultural reading of time as non-linear, how does Futures Literacy cope with these variations?
LD: When we work with futures, we use something called a dynamic re-frame technique. So having listened to peoples’ probable and desirable futures, we come up with a re-frame scenario, which could be that time is no longer linear, or that you are now a snail, or that you now have strawberries instead of legs. Not everyone agrees but, to me, the re-frame can be completely outlandish or impossible because it still leads to the question of what it means to be human, and what assumptions we have about being human. So you can design re-frame scenarios that are complex and multi-layered and lead to all kinds of assumptions being questioned.
IN: So by deconstructing what we know, or think we know, together, we might come to new truths or happen upon new directions. Or we might not. That resonates with how these conversations are unfolding, but I wanted to draw attention to your recent blog post in which you identify the difference between sensing and making sense, because I think this connects here too.
LD: As humans, or maybe as humans in a Western context, we have a need to make sense of the world, to solve complexity on our own terms. Sensing, on the other hand, involves awareness without the assumption that we can place something within our own construct. It involves moving more slowly and more humbly amongst other beings.
IN: I think I’ve started learning, or at least urging, myself to do this — to slow down, to make space for emergence and notice what emerges. I think I’ve been experiencing some of the benefits of doing this in my own life and art, but its difficult because that approach is incompatible with the systems that we are all a part of. The worlds or art or film making, for example, are impossibly caught up with the notion of producing work, so it’s difficult to see how ‘making sense’ could be disentangled from that. And if I stop making work, as I mostly have done over the last year, can I still call myself an artist? So what is needed is for these wider systems to make space for sensing, noticing and emergence. I don’t really see that happening, but I think that your work could play an important role in bridging those worlds.
LD: We perceive the world in a certain way. We look at problems and we tend to act. If we perceive the world as full of problems, then we tend to act as urgently as possible in order to solve them. It’s hard for governments and corporations to sit back and appreciate complexity because it’s not what they’re designed to do. It’s a challenge to them. We designed our world to eliminate uncertainty for our species, but we are coming to the realization that the world and the universe don’t conform to that view, and that is incredibly challenging and scary. But if we face these challenges with the same tools, then we are just making the same mistakes again. As Bayo says, how we respond to a problem is part of the problem.
IN: So let me bring this to a close by focusing back in again, by asking how you have responded to the problems thrown up by the last year? I’m interested in how Futures Literacy has equipped you to deal with the more prominent place that uncertainty now has in our lives?
LD: I used to travel a lot, and during those times I felt most at home while being in transit. It was like mobility defined me and my work. Confined to home during Covid I wondered what would happen to my identity. Exploring this, I recognized the assumptions I had about myself, my identity and mobility, which forced me to let go of these and be more open to what emerged. Actually it’s been a really adventurous year because I took many emotional and intellectual risks. Life is always equally uncertain, the only reason it feels less certain now is because we made assumptions about continuity, which have been challenged. When I realized that, I was like ‘Wow, that’s all it is!’. It’s incredible. Of course, there have been moments for sadness and sorrow, but there is no fear or anxiety over loss of control, because I never had control. I only had anxiety. I was grieving for something that I thought I was going to lose. If I look it straight in the eye, I see no reason to be anxious. Right now I have no idea where I’m going, or we’re going, but I’m happy with that.
