Geoff Mulgan

A conversation on art, radical imagination and hope, this talk with Geoff Mulgan is part of the FUTURES Thoughts talk series at Malmö Research Centre for Imagining and Co-creating Futures (ICF).

Geoff Mulgan is professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London, UK and keynote address at Malmö Möts. The talk will be curated by Marika Hedemyr and focus on his work pertaining to art, radical imagination and hope as capacities for reimagining democracy.

In this talk, Mulgan will address the role of the arts in social imagination and shaping the future. How much is their role to warn, to testify, to spot emergent patterns or to make the present feel unnatural?  And how well placed are they now to do more detailed design, future visions and pathways? He'll look at the role of radical imagination, utopias and distopias, and why more prescriptive literature, film or art sometimes feels banal. He will argue that the idea of the arts as trailblazers or legislators is sometimes misunderstood. They contribute best at a tangent rather than head on, encouraging hope by showing the plasticity of the world, and contributing to explorations of possible futures and pathways more than precise blueprints.

Participants

Geoff Mulgan, Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London, UK

Marika Hedemyr, artist, choreographer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Art and Communication (K3), Malmö University

Malmö Research Centre for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures

About Geoff Mulgan

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