Future-making Academy
– to read futures for societal change
Do you work with social transformation and change? Perhaps you are a civil servant within a municipality or region, a teacher, an activist, work at an NGO, or an artist. Do you want to deepen your knowledge and reflect together with others?
The Future-making Academy at Malmö University is an initiative where we invite you to a reading circle with a focus on complexity, future-making, and collaboration. The purpose is to make research available, deepen and provide space to examine and discuss how thoughts and ideas from the texts we read can resonate with our own practices.
The reading circle is conducted in both Swedish and English. No specific skills are required or needed to participate besides an interest in reading and reflecting.
Future-making Academy #2
The second round of Future-making Academy, is now fully booked. It is held on four occasions:
Session 1 – 7 November, 3-7 PM
Session 2 – 16 January, 3-7 PM
Session 3 – 6 February, 3-7 PM
Session 4 – 27 February, 3-7 PM
The reading circle, which is free of charge, is held in both Swedish and English at Malmö Konsthall.
About Future-making Academy
Watch our film with two of the reading circle’s conversation leaders, Pernilla Glaser and Per-Anders Hillgren.
Conversation leaders
Pernilla Glaser
Pernilla Glaser is a writer and educator. She works in the intersection between research, societal services and artistic practice. Her background includes working at Rise with societal change and design. She is the initiator of several spaces for conversation and reflection, like The Festival of sketches and Salong Krångel.
Per-Anders Hillgren
Per-Anders Hillgren has been active in the research field of participatory design for a number of years. He is interested in how we can increase our ability to imagine alternative, more sustainable and inclusive futures, but also how we can democratize processes of change.
Kristina Lindström
Kristina Lindström’s research explore design practices that in a gentle way aims to untangle the strong focus on progress in design. Currently, she runs the project Hope and Grief in Transition, in the Scanian countryside.
Michael Strange
Michael Strange is a radically interdisciplinary researcher with a background in Political Science interested in multiple questions around Artificial Intelligence, Healthcare, Trade, and Migration.
Carin Cuadra
Carin Cuadra is a professor in social work. Her interests have mainly involved the distribution of security, welfare and welfare services with an underpinning interest for vulnerability, insecurity and risk in human life. Her current research involves eco-social interventions in local contexts.
In the Future-Making Academy, we attempt to jointly exercise our critical imagination. This means that together we challenge ingrained beliefs and assumptions that are both taken for granted in society and by ourselves, and which stand in the way of changing society in a more sustainable and inclusive direction. It can be about ideas regarding the world, about the human nature, what things are, how we organize ourselves, produce value, or how we understand our professional identities and roles. In order to practice our critical imagination, we try to create the conditions to dare to stay longer in problems and uncertainties. Instead of predicting the future, we are trying to jointly promote several possible futures that we are exploring in the present.
We have created this reading and reflection circle because we think that places where we can gather with different experiences and abilities, and jointly investigate the meanings of different ways of describing and understanding the world, are greenhouses for new future-making and sustainable methods and perspectives. We ourselves have lacked spaces for an open conversation about different ideas and we see reading as a practice that can be made into a collective and mobilizing act to a greater extent than what happens today.
We are so happy that you are part of our joint exploration. Reading can be many different things and experienced in many different ways. We invite you to a place where we share and develop reading as a multifaceted practice. The overarching theme of our four meetings is the entanglement of our times. How can we understand and describe things that we cannot see and what does it mean to make our way together in unknown terrain?
Before each occasion, you get a list of a number of texts to read. It is a mix of research, popular science, essays and fiction. Sometimes you get perspectives or questions to accompany the reading. Some texts may welcome you with open arms, others may stand firm, half turned away and difficult to get along with. Both enthusiasm and resistance are meaningful material in our joint work.
Through the Future-making Academy we want to create a joint exploration. At each session, we will work with what the texts describe and discuss what the reading of them was like and what they open up and resonate with our own practice. We will also work with how different ways of reading can activate texts in different ways.
Our reading circle will be held in both Swedish and English. You will receive some texts in English and some in Swedish and we will have some presentations in English. You are welcome to speak in either Swedish or English, whichever you are most comfortable with, and we will help translate if necessary.
About Future-making Academy
The Future-making Academy is organized by the research platform Collaborative Future Making at the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University in collaboration with Forum for Social Innovation Sweden, and with the help of Pernilla Glaser.