Maya Van Leemput is Senior Researcher for the Research Center Open Time | Applied Futures Research at Erasmus Brussels University of Applied Sciences and the Arts, where she also teaches Strategic Futures Orientation. Van Leemput is the UNESCO Chairholder Images of the Futures and Co-creation for the Open Time team. Van Leemput earned a PhD from the University of Westminster for research on “Visions of the Future on Television.” In partnership with photographer Bram Goots, she runs a long-term independent project for exploring images of the future, combining conversation-based approaches and visual ethnography with multi-media co-creation. Her critical, forward-looking work on media, culture, arts, cross-cultural communication, development, and science and technology in society, uses experimental, creative and participatory approaches. Van Leemput is a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation and the Centre of Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies, a member of the board of the Association of Professional Futurists, and a founding member of the interdisciplinary visual arts collective OST and the Plurality University.
Interviewed by: Peter Hayward
More about Maya
Twitter: @AFcrew
Instagram: @NewAFcrew
Reading and viewing:
About collaboration and transdisciplinarity in JSF special issue on Futures and Design, 2019
About Postnormal Times in Third Text, 2018
About the future of cities in Critical Muclim, 2019
About the exhibition A Temporary Futures Institute
About the Design, Develop, Transform conference
Audio Transcript
Peter Hayward: Hello and welcome to Futurepod. I'm Peter hayward.
How can you organize, listen and sensibly, engage everybody in a conversation about a possible or preferred futures? Are we trying to agree on what we think the future might be or should be? Or are we trying to use our differences in order to learn more about ourselves, others, and the future itself?
Maya Van Leemput: If you're working with heterogeneous groups like I did between 2012 and 2014 in the Congo, we worked with young adults from Brussels and from Lubumbashi, put them together and they had to co-create their images of the future. And then we put them together with artists. While the differences between the European and the African participants in the beginning were something they focused on a lot, as soon as the artists were added, they were the funny ones, the ones that were different and these young people suddenly saw all their similarities rather than their differences.
Peter Hayward: That is Maya Van Leemput, she is the UNESCO Chair on Images of the Future, and co-creation at a the Erasmus university in Brussels. And she was my guest on Futurepod today.
Welcome to Future Pod Maya.
Maya Van Leemput: Thank you Peter. And hello, how are you?
Peter Hayward: I'm pretty good. So you've said you're a fan of FuturePod, so you know, the first question is the one that all the listeners love to hear, which is the story question. So what's the Maya Van Leemput story? How did Maya become a member of the futures and foresight community?
Maya Van Leemput: Well, I guess my story starts when I finished my master's in communication in Brussels and I set out to do my PhD at the University of Westminster in London. What I knew I wanted to do was to study television. I went to London because it is like public service television heaven, or it was at the time. I went there knowing that I wanted to combine a content analysis and a discourse analysis with a production study, because generally in media research, there were lots of people doing content analysis and then drawing conclusions about production. I thought we needed to actually combine the two. I knew I wanted to study television. I'm really television generation. I grew up with it from the beginning, it still exists. I love how television actually combines the good and the bad and the smart and the mind numbing, puts it all together and that this is actually what defines that medium.
And so I needed a theme for this discourse analysis. Generally, the content analysis of media at the time, and still today actually, limited itself to just a few themes. You have, gender and race stereotyping, the representation of crime and violence, maybe terrorism, sex on television. That would be like the themes that were usually selected for this kind of work and I wanted something else. At a certain point my partner and I were talking about what I would do and we ended up thinking about this idea that maybe it I could look at television about the future. It has some real advantages that I understood at the time already before ever having even heard of Future Studies or Foresight.
The reasons I knew at the time were threefold plus one. The first one was that it was a topic that would allow me to look at a wide range of programs, it would allow me to do a cross genre study so I could have fiction and non-fiction, I could have series and single programs. I thought that was a real advantage. I understood that there are really very few themes that encompass such a variety of subtexts and possible narratives as the future does. The future really doesn't preclude any topical focus, we say the futures of X, Y, or Z.
I liked that in order to put the future on screen, you have to imagine it first so that the challenge to producing programs about the future is even greater than producing other kinds of programs. I thought that was really interesting, the fact that there's never a set already existing that's waiting for the cameraman, that it all has to be thought up by the makers. Since I wanted to study production, that was a real advantage to this topic for me.
And then specifically in the context of public service television in the UK at the time, I thought it was also important that futures is a contested space in public debate -even if it's not sufficiently explicitly contested, if you ask me. At the time, my focus was on that too. How does television actually take that responsibility of making this a subject we can all talk about and putting it out there. At the time my focus was on public debate and today it still is, but now it has come to include this possibility just of gathering and of joint undertakings of spaces for all kinds of dialogue that futures offers.
And then the plus one -so these were the three. The plus one then is that I noticed that television professionals thought it was a little bit weird, but also a little bit cool to look at the future as actual subject matter. Because they got reactions like ‘who, but, the future? We don't have department for that’ or, ‘that's not a topic’. But generally the people I needed to interview were really curious and gave their time generously. And I still find that's the case when I tell people, ‘I wanna talk with you and I wanna talk about the future’ that they think it could be fun. I did have fun with the topic during my PhD and the people I talked with seemed to be the same and I believe that's a really serious advantage for what you're trying to do. For me it was always really satisfying to see these professionals go "Ah, Yes, you're right. It's about the future."
During my PhD research, I got one golden tip from my supervisor who knew nothing about futures, right? He's a broadcasting theoretician, so very different angle. He did give me a golden tip and I actually talked with Andrew Curry in 1996. Only many years later we reconnected, being part of the same community. But I thought, I know that's my first futurist. At the time also there were actually surprisingly few futures references in the biblography of that PhD. I had Polak, f ortunately, Images of the Future for this subject was really important and Maruyama, Boulding, Toffler. But I think at the end of my PhD I was ready to become connected to the Futures field but I wasn't yet. And then in my first Postdoctoral research project, that's where that happened.
So it was always the intention to connect a practical to my thesis. Either, I thought maybe to produce a television program about the future myself -I learned what that would've meant and it took another 10 years before I did. My partner was studying fine art at the time. He's a photographer and a cameraman and together we developed this independent Postdoctoral research project. It's a mixed practice project and we called it Agence Future.
The idea was that after collecting mediated, televised images of the future, it would also be interesting to hear what was going on in people's hearts and minds and how people actually think and feel about the future. We set up this project for which we traveled with two recumbent bicycles, laid back feet first. Five continents, 27 countries, I t was between 1999 and 2003. We held 382 conversations, one in five with people who in their daily practice had some kind of explicit forward looking perspective, but not necessarily futurists. There was actually only half a dozen futurists in that series.
We had a semi-structured interview schedule and we really bet on mixing different fields of practice. So I was doing research and my partner was making photos and creating visuals and neither of us were really journalists, but we also took journalistic questions into the mix. Also, we insisted that when people had ideas about the future that we we try them out. We would actually experiment with them and that was really educational. It was a great start.
This is the project that started to connect me to the futurist field. In Hungary we interviewed professor Simay at Corvenius University, who knew all about futures. Then in Australia I met Tony Stevenson, who hosted us and gifted us a solid intro to Foresight. Then Reed Reiner in Flagstaff, who saw the ethnographic character of what we were trying to do and referred me to Textor's ethnographic futures research. He also really brought home the importance of Boulding's Polak translation and what it had meant to the development of futures thinking and work.
Peter Hayward: Television is such an interesting technology for broadcasting images of whatever let alone broadcasting images of the future. And in my generation, television was seen as being futuristic itself. It's obviously less so now. Given that you know that I've got an interest in Polak, and particularly that, images of the future, generate culture, generate energy are their own little philosophical worlds. Does any of that weaves Polak and that whole notion of essence optimism and influence of what is broadcast?
Maya Van Leemput: Having broadcast makes a real difference in how we distribute and share our images of the future. I t provides different kinds of options for how to bring them across. I like media rich accounts of the future, for the same reason people like experiential futures, because they give you a different experience of the ideas in these images of the future. And they bring you closer and they make things more real. The problem that television professionals always put to me, was that you can't go to the future and shoot there. There's no doing that. And I don't think your question was about that, but it was about this the way that people actually begin to share the same stories and the same images because broadcast implies that there's like a large number of people seeing the same content.
Peter Hayward: I suppose Maya, it's a very crude piece of analysis by me that I'm sure you can improve, but if you think of just, the generic Polak four images and you imagine what as portrayals of futures, really, it seems that television and a lot of media tends to prefer futures that belong in the lower left of Polak . That the future is hopeless. That where people don't have power, where the future's going wrong. That is almost the default setting for so many images of the future. You very rarely see media try to portray futures other than that kind of dystopian side. Maybe that's just because that's actually makes better television.
Maya Van Leemput: Yeah. So in news studies that's really well known: bad news is preferred over good news because it's got better attention to the narrative.
Peter Hayward: If it bleeds, it leads, I think is the saying, isn't it?
Maya Van Leemput: Yeah, exactly. In the nineties, I found that all the eschatological futures, all the negative breakdown type stories were mostly in fiction. So you'd have post apocalyptic, even animation series for children and movies, they were all in the sample and then in the nonfiction -that's Tomorrow's World and Horizon, these kinds of programs- the experts got to tell you how the future was going to be more and better and either bigger or much smaller. Then at the same time, when you had less positive images in nonfiction, it would be these end of world, strange American weirdos or something like that, explaining how they saw the end of the world.
So that was a major motivator for me to think: ‘that's not right, that's not the mix that's really out there, there's not just the experts telling us everything is going to become fantastic and techno optimism and all that and then on the other hand the crazy end of world prophets, there must be a lot more than that.’ That's also why I started to want to not just look at media content, but also talk with real people
Peter Hayward: I think it was Robert Jungk when I read one of his pieces of work, and it was back in the Sixties , but he studied what experts said about the future and what non-experts said. And his conclusion was the experts saw the future as being bigger, faster, better, shinier. And the non-experts saw the future as being continuation of the people who have power still have more power. The people who have less power have even less. For people whose life is difficult, the future is gonna be harder for people who life is easy, the future's gonna be easier. And Jungk's conclusion was, if you do a backcast on who was the more accurate, it was the non-experts that were more accurate in forecasting the future because the experts just didn't understand the world they lived in.
Maya Van Leemput: I don't know whether it would've been the same then, but my finding with experts was also that they were much more hesitant -or they are- much more hesitant, to talk about anything that's not within their expertise. If they're demographers, they want to talk about the changes in our population, the constitution of our population. But if they're biologists, they want to talk about biodiversity. And then if you ask them to talk about anything else, they go ‘yeah, but I don't know’. To which I would say ‘yeah, you're the same as all of us in that’. I think that was the main difference I found between experts and non-experts. There’s also how much they were prepared to also consider that thinking about your own individual future is relevant.
And so in 2005, I became a member of the World Future Studies Federation. I think that to me counts as okay, now I've found my connection to this field and this community. And that's actually for me where that story ends. But it doesn't because um, yeah, it, there were always new projects and new things to learn and so yeah.
Peter Hayward: So Maya you're interested in not just dialogue. Really you're interested in this ability to talk our way through different futures. That we're not trying to just work out what the future's gonna be by staying at our safe little box of expertise that we need to get into the uncomfortable. I don't know what's gonna happen with technology and culture and aging and biology and everything else, and yet we still can imagine futures and talk about them. And your are very passionate about this notion of the polylogue. Do you wanna just talk to the listeners about polylogue?
Maya Van Leemput: I use polylogue as an ideal model in the four year research program for the UNESCO Chair on Images of the Future and Co-creation. This is at my school in Brussels, Erasmus Brussels University. Our main research question mixes up a few things. It is about how media, art and design can actually contribute to nurture and improve scaled and intertwined polylogues for the co-creation of images of the future. So that's a lot of parts.
We're thinking about how can we actually co-create images of the future with heterogeneous groups. This concept of scaled polylogues I knew from Zia Sardar's and John Sweeney's article where they suggest that we need to negotiate our way towards a new normal. This is in postnormal times thinking. They ask the question how you organize, listen and sensibly engage everyone in a discourse, that can actually help us think about possibilities and our images and preferences together. I like the idea that by engaging you could actually create the space for that kind of engagement. By setting up exchanges, this space would actually make itself. f we have more of these exchanges or we recognize where they are taking place, this space for mutual exchange can become greater and more well used. They insisted that "polylogues require the creation of a new physical and mental spaces where diversity, pluralism and contending perspectives are present on their own terms and also deeply invested in engaging others in creating and sharing information and knowledge". Now that sounds to me like a really good way of co-creating images of the future.
Peter Hayward: One of the things that certainly Zia talked about in his podcast and he and John wrote about is given post-normal futures, given we are in the, not now not yet space, we're in that space of where what was in the past is no longer what is what we're moving into. They talk about this notion of actually unlearning in order to learn. That we're not actually moving towards consensus. We're actually learning to unlearn the things that are holding us back to allow us to actually co-create. And that to me is quite a distinct thing that is not often taught for people.
Maya Van Leemput: What attracts me most -and you describe that- is you're not looking for consensus. The idea of these different voices coming together is not for being merged into a single perspective or for being subordinated to a single authoritative voice. Each of these voices has its own perspective, its own validity and its own narrative weight. That's what makes it an ideal model, right? Because in the world we don't really have that kind of equality when we have our exchanges.
When I was running a series of workshops with cultural workers in Antwerp, with rather high level directors of cultural centers and people like that, they were really worried when we began the workshop series and said ‘yeah, but we're going to talk and we all have different views and then some kind of lowest common denominator of that is going to come out and that's going to be like a really weak soup. It's not ggoing to be interesting anymore.’ Even though they were aware and happy that they all had a different point of view and that this was exactly why they were getting together, they couldn't even imagine that it was not to come to some kind of a consensus where they all agreed on what needed to happen with culture in Antwerp in the next 15 years. So I think that's one important thing that we really have to unlearn. We can have constructive and useful and even practical exchanges without this requirement of consensus.
Peter Hayward: Is that what the UNESCO chair is about? This notion of images of the future and co-creation? It's not just the image. It's almost the co-creation that actually is the foundation of the images and it is a plurality of images they're not actually working as a set or working as a system, they're often in conflict or bouncing off one another.
Maya Van Leemput: Yes. It's about co-creation, about all the different ways in which we already do it and how else we might be able to do that. As I started out with an analysis of images of the future on television, I understand that those are images that I didn't co-create. I'm just, consuming them, but they were co-created by other people. I thought that the interesting idea in the post-normal version of polylogue is that they are scaled. Even the smallest conversation is actually a polylogue if you have this equality of the voices.
What we are doing with the Chair is it's kind of Action Research. We're trying to find groups who already have a futures orientation, but are not futurists or who are engaging somehow with the not yet. We want to support these activities, but also connect them to each other so that all these futures-oriented activities of different scales and scopes can actually also influence each other.
So we find them, they are separate from each other, but at a certain point per geographical cluster we put these people all together and we say ‘go again’. You've been co-creating in your own context, which I think is really important. A lot of the time we set up participatory futures projects with a given theme for somebody, a group or an organization that's is interested in this particular domain and then we try and find the right participants and we invite them into our project. What I think is really interesting is to find groups and people who are already engaged somehow in this forward-looking activities and then adding ourselves into their projects rather than inviting people into ours. I think it's a better form of inclusivity.
For me it's important that we don't say ‘Hey, this is interesting and you ought to be talking about this and come to us and we will help you talk about it.’ Instead I go ‘What are you talking about? Ah, yeah, that's something I can also talk about.’ and now we add ourselves to that. Also, a lot of the time we work with artists or with organizations in the cultural sphere. But even if the activity is not by itself an artistic activity, I think it's really interesting to put media, arts, design processes and people in this conversation because they have a different perspective.
The more you're used to this generative mode where you put something new into the world…like artists, they're not scared to do that. Also, what's really nice is working with heterogeneous groups like I did between 2012 and 2014 in the Congo. We worked with young adults from Brussels and from Lubumbashi, put them together and to co-create their images of the future. And then we put them together with artists who were going to put a piece together with a mixed group of these young adults. While the differences between the European and the African participants in the beginning were something they focused on a lot, as soon as the artists were added, they were the funny ones, the ones that were different and these young people suddenly saw all their similarities rather than their differences.
And there's that making the future real part that you can really achieve, that you can get closer to with media arts and design approaches. And that's often the trouble: people feel we are just philosophizing and they are just learning how you are thinking but you are somebody entirely different in an entirely different context. As soon as these images also become tangible somehow, you can see something or touch it or smell it, or it becomes something that you can somehow already experience in present, then the attitudes do change. I think that's by itself polyphony, is a really nice model, but I also think it's really nice if inside that polyphony there's, these media arts and design processes and people to help the process along and also for different kinds of results.
Peter Hayward: You touch on an interesting point, Maya, which is just an observation that our discipline or our field, our community, we do have a, I am not gonna say a preference, but we tend to write down a lot of words about the future , so we tend to have a prose approach to explaining what the future could be. And we actually, not as a natural process, do we move into the visual imagining objectifying of a future. And I wonder if that's something that you think is changing and will continue to change in the way that people who do what we do, do it in the future.
Maya Van Leemput: I'm not sure that it's the objectifying that is the bit that's the most interesting in what you achieve by making futures more imaginable with visuals for example. You have all these words and these papers and reports, but now how to relate that to the real experience of our lives? And how to make it not just something that's possible maybe far away. It renders proximity. I think that's important. And it brings you closer to these future possibilities, but it also brings the future possibilities closer to you. And then I think that it does have an an effect also on influence optimism. People understand their own agency better when they are closer to imagining what all these ideas about the future actually could concretely mean in our lives.
You asked about visualizing the future and how it's helpful and we have this experiment where I ask a bunch of futurists to fill in an order form for an image of the future and my time traveling husband will go and take that picture in any future of your choosing. And and we've done this in Taiwan when in 2015 amongst others. And when I wrote about it I found myself saying yeah, you know what, they always say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but somehow I can't write this paper in five pictures. 5,000 words to translate them into five pictures, they are just different ways of communicating. There are different ways of relating what you find in reality and they do different things and they need to exist together, all these words that we write and these visuals and these features and these experiences and designs.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Maya. I'm gonna pivot on that lovely term you just introduced this notion of proximity and how we experience the proximity to ideas about the future. . So this is the question of what are the emerging futures that seem proximate to you that that you are both experiencing and reacting to? Either moving towards them or possibly even wanting to either reject or push away.
Maya Van Leemput: I want to talk about the personal -or the individual- first. I just had my birthday and I realized I could actually start planning like in five year plans. I saw that in 15 years time I'm gonna be 69. And I'm like: ‘Oh, wow. Yeah.’ So now this time became something else. I'm thinking about that quite a bit at the moment. We are planning, for the rest of the Chair program together with Agence Future and Open Time and the CPPFS because all these groups are involved in the ‘Poly work’ to return also to places where we've been in the beginning of the two thousands and go and actually have these polylogues in these places and use the material that we collected before there. And so I'm actually quite excited about what might be coming when we actually start to do that. And we do visit Australia and we go back to Lubumbashi and we continue our work there. And so on the personal level, I think although it's a little bit scary, it's also very attractive and I'm looking forward to finding out what it is going to be like.
Peter Hayward: I suppose Maya, it just struck me that given you've got this tremendous enthusiasm for promoting and promulgating polylogue, but as we get older and we understand that there'll be a point where I am not doing this anymore. It seems to me part of the kind of future is the future that you have in fact passed this on. This is not something that Maya does or Maya is needed for. That people now see polylogue as just the way they do things, or in fact the best way of doing things.
Maya Van Leemput: I want people to understand that concept and use it as a model. I think it is enough if polylogue is just already taking place more, if people actually learn to have these open, non hierarchical conversations and explore together and understand that they are learning together because of their differences. There is an enormous amount of polylogue already taking place and just feeding it and practicing with it right now may make it a little bit stronger in certain spaces where it can continue. It's not like I feel like I need somebody else to follow and be the missionary for polylogue.
I always find the missionary aspect of future's work a little bit questionable, although not as well. We're constantly communicating and trying to bring that aha moment to other people and at the same time, especially, as a European in, say in the Congo, as a Belgian in an old colony of my country, you really wanna be careful about that and understand that, you want to come and see what the thinking is that's already present there and then take part in that and make the diversity of the conversations that are being had greater by adding your perspective as well. If I can give that reflex to a few of my students to have conversations with people about the future and to not be scared that there are opposing points of view and that you have the conversations in good spirit. Then…I'm not sure that this is gonna be like the lifesaving concept. I'm sure it's a really good practice and very helpful and that we need to practice it as much as we possibly can to unlearn all these more hierarchical and boxed in ways that we organize exchanges in otherwise.
So this is the only question I didn't prepare notes for, because if a non futurist journalist would ask me, I would automatically revert to four generic alternative images of the future and talk about that. There are many different possibilities and within each of the possibilities, there's good and bad. It's not like a best case and a worst case, these kinds of caricatures of reality, I don't expect to find them in the future like we don't really find them in the present.
When you asked the question, and you put the emotion of your relationship to the futures that you see emerging around you, quite central, or at least in my reception of that question it was like that. What is scary is the idea that while I can see the possibility for diversity and opening things up, there is also this movement towards closing things down and limiting them and top down insistence on some type of standard that I never agreed to and I'm sure that other people can also object to. So I think that maybe that's also why polylogue is important to me because that's a picture of a good way to move ahead for me.
Peter Hayward: That does seem to be one of the big contests that we are seeing around the world as to how we create narratives to deal with post-normal futures. And the polylogue, I imagine is saying, let's embrace the post-normal. Let's learn from it. Let's learn from each other. Let's generate the understanding from the complexity and post normality and the opposite, of course, is to simply say, no, it isn't that complicated. I can tell you the way the world works, I can tell you what's good. I can tell you what's bad. And what's interesting Maya, is that when you put it into a democratic process is which one creates the majority?
Maya Van Leemput: At the moment it's half everywhere. It's we half on Brexit. We had half on the presidential elections in the US. We have half-halves everywhere and here we have it too now.
Peter Hayward: You would say as a polylogueist, that you would hope that people, when they're given the chance to dialogue, without limit would move and accept that. And yet, if you look at people's behaviors, you actually see what seems to be a retreat from complexity, a retreat from, yeah. Post conventionality. Yeah. And hence this contest of how we will talk about the future, or we won't talk about the future .
Maya Van Leemput: I'm not sure it's a contest. I work in an arts collective in Brussels, and they're called Birds without Heads, which is also really nice Belgium dish, by the way. But the idea is that, we are really very polylogical. We're very flat structure, and all of us have our own contributions, depending, not just on our own constitution, but on the day and the week and the period. It has helped me understand that practicing polylogue as much as you possibly can in all these different contexts, flattening the hierarchy in the classroom, having a collective where everybody else is a visual artist, but I'm there like, I don't know, the mad professor or something like that, we can all continue to exchange. And we can, even if the other side wins this contest, continue doing that. We don't have to have anybody's permission. We don't need this authority to agree that this is what we should be doing.
I think that's, it's important that we do what we believe is right also and the way that we think is right, and that we also allow ourselves to make mistakes and to be caught up into the oppositional types of conversations that are all around us all the time at the moment, like you said, these two positions are really colliding. People call it polarization and all the scary things that might be coming in the future. That it is your friends and the groups that you can actually be in connection with and relate to that this is the space where you can actually still find the potential for better.
Peter Hayward: If somebody wants to simplify it, if somebody wants to talk about there are clear rights wrongs up, down black, white, then you can polylogue with that .
Maya Van Leemput: Sure. Exactly. People expect a lot of controversy though. It's like the bad news thing that we talked about at the beginning where bad news has got a better narrative tension and so this is more popular. It is easier to clash with each other than to find ways to inquire about but how is it that you interpret it like that? And what experience does it actually relate to? And who else do you know that thinks like that and what do they say about it? And, these conversations are. They still require more effort and that's why we need to practice them more, I think.
Peter Hayward: Thanks Maya. The communication question, how do you explain this to people, Maya, when they don't understand what a polylogue is and what it is you do? So how does Maya explain to people what Maya does when they don't know what Maya does?
Maya Van Leemput: So I explain futures to them. I say that I'm a professional and an academic futurist, and I'm also a maker that my field goes by many names and that just like any other field in particular in social science, there are many different schools and branches and many different reasons for studying the future and many ways to do it.
I do also always talk about that we've understood for a long time that it's impossible to predict and people usually agree that this is a common sense starting point. Nevertheless, a bit later they will ask me ‘yeah, but how can you know that it's accurate what you are saying about future?’ But basically, in principle, they agree. Still, it's hard for a lot of people to really incorporate what that means.
I insist that because it's impossible to go to the future and check out what's going on there that you need to think about many different possibilities. And so I explain that what we do in futures is to think about possibility and how people and groups imagine the future, what their images of the future are, how they are constructed, deconstructed, distributed, used, and abused. A lot of the time people really get it when I get to abused. ‘Ah yeah, I can see what you mean.’
So a lot of the time you need to continue a little bit about what it means to think about possibility, that you think about what could happen, how it could happen, what we want to happen, and also that we don't limit ourselves to the most likely seeming possibilities, but seek to include beyond the extended present and familiar futures, and also unthought futures, preposterous possibilities like it's called as in Joseph's cone and far out alternatives.
Normally by then it's high time to go back to what it means concretely, what I'm doing. There's a lot of theory at first. I explain that in my work I talk with very many different kinds of people about their futures thinking and how they feel about the future. Then usually by that time, it's really time for my conversation partner to begin to tell me something about how they themselves think about the future and why they think it's important or why it seems senseless to them. And then the conversation continues naturally from there.
Also often I have to reassure my conversation partner that it's not strange or not surprising that they haven't heard of futures before, of this field. I might talk about the fact that our northern neighbors, the Dutch who, created their own country from the sea in a manner of speaking, have much more forward looking inclinations than Belgians in general do. Then a lot of the time the conversation turns to living with uncertainty. I'm not so into that embracing vocabulary. I don't know about embracing, but I do tell my conversation partners that it is uncertainty itself that makes hope possible for me. Without uncertainty, I have no hope.
Then finally I want to say that, I try to talk about this openness of the future and the open-ended thinking that it allows me to do and open-ended feeling and understanding also. That it is precisely because we can't know what will come and what won't that this topic helps you to be more open in a way. It obliges you almost. And a lot of the time, I would then add also that I feel good about challenging what is stuck, or held back by the weight of the past. I point out that I enjoy the depth of the connective work that it allows me to do, where I talk with one person and then another person or a group here, and a group there and then bring these groups together. I'm having a polylogue with one and with another and these get intertwined. And so the conversation gets bigger and I enjoy that.
And then really finally I always thought, and sometimes I tell that to my conversation partners as well, that I would like to be a student till retirement. And so futures does help me to keep learning and that's what I'm here for. I could cite more altruistic motivations, but basically it's the kind of of topic that's never going to be finished anyway so you have this certainty of continuing, having to continue to learn. And that's what I enjoy about it.
What is really important to me is that we don't pretend that the conditions of the interventions that we set up can be kept equal in different contexts. And that we need open-ended experimentation. And also people ask me a lot of the time ‘okay, you are going to these people with your wisdom and all that’. But I think it's just to change the mix that I'm going: to add, to put in a few drops of my future's perspectives into these polylogues that people are actually already having. That's it.
Peter Hayward: Yes. The people are polyloging without you and they can polylogue with you and you would hope that they are richer for the mixing.
Maya I dunno if this has been a polylogue cuz it's just been the two of us. And of course everybody who's listening to this. It feels like we've done a lot of circling and this and that thing, so it's probably pollogue-ish. But thank you very much for taking some time out do a bit of dialoguing and polyloging with me and the Futurepod community.
Maya Van Leemput: Thank you for having me. I'm really glad that this collection exists and I'll be listening to many more episodes. Thank you Peter.
Peter Hayward: I hope you enjoyed my polylogue with Maya. I'm sure you would agree that more than ever, we need ways and means of having generative conversations about difficult subjects with diverse groups. And Maya's research and approach to this is very necessary and I hope you feel encouraged to try a bit of polylogging in the future.
Futurepod is a not-for-profit venture. We exist through the generosity of our supporters. If you would like to support the Pod then please check out our Patreon which you will find a link to on our website. This has been Peter Hayward saying goodbye for now.