Collaborative Future-Making

FMA Spring 2023 is fully booked. If you want to be contacted and possibly join the next FMA you can send an email to Charlotte Orban.

14 February - 13 April

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 a new initiative where we invite you to a reading circle focusing 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 will be conducted in both Swedish and English. No specific skills are required or needed to participate besides an interest in reading and reflecting. However, it is important to be able to participate in all meetings because the group is carefully put together to be a good interdisciplinary reflection environment.

Learn more about Future-making Academy

The Leadership and Organization Group and the platform of Collaborative Future-Making hereby invite you to the 2nd symposium at Malmö University on the theme of storytelling and collaborative future-making. The symposium will take place 2-4 May 2023.

We invite a varied group of scholars from disciplines like design studies, leadership and organization studies, work science, communication, art, architecture, education and urban planning. The symposium is organized by Associate Professor Hope Witmer, Professor Per-Anders Hillgren and Professor Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen. The theme Storytelling and Collaborative Future Making addresses collaborative responses to making a sustainable and common future within the diverse areas mentioned above.

The symposium explores new ideas and approaches that mix storytelling and collaboration with questions concerning human rights and our relations to nature. 

A common thread in the symposium is to explore the role that storytelling can have in crafting ethical foundations for work, organization, design, architecture, education and urban development. Storytelling and collaboration for earthly survival mix with questions concerning how to collaborate and organize for human rights. While the 17 SDGs have been successful in mobilizing attention to questions concerning sustainability and inclusion, the embedded idea of balancing profit, people, and the planet in actual strategies and practices seems to be off-track in practising sustainable and inclusive development. Sustainability and inclusion are more and more at risk of becoming empty signifiers. Therefore, this symposium presents new ideas, concepts and approaches that allow for new understandings of how to work with all aspects of sustainability, and which aim for organizational and societal impact.

The symposium explores new ideas and approaches that mix storytelling and collaboration with questions concerning human rights and our relations to nature. These approaches might range from new embodied, relational, and material understandings of storytelling, the problematic and complex relations between small stories and grand narratives, the relations between places, spaces, and stories, post-human, transhuman and storytelling and -making for Gaia, feminist or queer storytelling. We also invite contributions on how to research and write differently in ways where we take upon us our earthly responsibility. Such contributions may be inspired by engaged scholarship, reflexive inquiry, post-qualitative inquiry, or speculative fabulation. Finally, we also invite new approaches to understand the details of how we work and collaborate and how they mix with issues concerning human rights and nature. These might comprise ideas from performative approaches to accounting, logistics, learning, collaboration, and planning.

Join us

If you want to join us, please submit an abstract of app. 500 words by 5 April 2023. This year we will also collect contributions for an edited book on storytelling and collaborative future-making. It is possible to only attend parts of the events. If this is the case, we would like you to provide information about when you are attending. The event is free of charge. We will not be offering accommodations for lunch or dinner. We will make space for social gatherings in Malmö and organize a joint meeting place for dinner in Malmö for those who are interested.

Contact

Please send any queries to the organizing committee, Kenneth, Hope or Per-Anders

• Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen
• Hope Witmer
• Per-Anders Hillgren