Interview with Marcus Bussey

Co-creation for sustainable futures

Marcus: Well, one of the good things about being mature or ‘old’ is that I have had a long and interesting life so far, and it has led me to take many journeys. I have been a musician, I have taught young children for around 20 years, in quite creative environments outside the formal school environment, in what we would call alternative schools, for instance. That all laid the foundations for my movement into academia about 20 years ago. And it meant that I have not been bound by some of the more conventional kinds of experiences that many academics may have experienced. All of that said, my interests are mainly in culture and cultural evolution.

And what does that mean? How can we describe it? Obviously, I use academic language when it is appropriate, but I will also use poetry, I will use dance and movement, improvisation and other tools like that. I am very comfortable with less conventional or mainstream academic processes. So one of the labels that I wear is that I am an historian, but the other is that I am a futurist and my futurist work is about exploring the anticipatory imagination, the role that culture and traditions play in shaping our expectations, and the way we think, and also what we hope for, and what we fear, and so on. It is also about thinking of the resources (cultural and material) that we have available to ourselves in order to engage with whatever the problems of the day are.

And there is an upcoming book, right?

Marcus: Yes, it is coming out hopefully at the end of May: Transitional Selves. And then, there are some new projects. One is a another interesting book called “Passion and Purpose”. This has been going on over the last four or five years actually, and with COVID it had slowed down a bit. In this project, I approach young scholars, asking them about what they are passionate about, why they are going into academia. They provide us some autobiographical sketch, and then tell us where they are now, and where they would like to be, in their research process. Woven through these accounts we have got these wonderful letters from senior academics and senior researchers giving advice, and some funny anecdotes about their own research journeys.

And currently, we have the Mistra-EC artist-in-residence (AiR) programme here at the University of the Sunshine Coast, hosting Caitlin (Franzmann). I think it is these conversations, these focused conversations that matter. When I am discussing AiR@USC artist Caitlin's work, I get excited!

(Click here to view the full interview with Caitlin Franzmann, with Marcus as the guest)

What motivated you to work on environment and sustainability issues? How was your involvement in Mistra Environmental Communication Programme?

Marcus: Well, research collaborations are relational, you know. I am working with a bunch of really great researchers, colleagues, and friends, and we all share concerns for the environment and for the state of communication of environmental issues. I mean, there is this division between the way science communicates and way the public responds. For me, it is really important to work at bridging that. So, when the Mistra project started to emerge, we ended up in conversations around a paper that I had written with some colleagues in Taiwan back in 2015 on what we call “anticipatory imagination”, and that was sort of the way in, you might say.

I have also been working in Sweden since 2005 with various colleagues, and running workshops, very much around community engagements and community conversations, and that was another skill that I brought to the Mistra Project: a skill that I was eager to explore in different ways. So, the co-creation lab has been conceptualised as a space for the Work Package 3 that I am part of. I think it is an important emerging method. There are labs all over the place: social labs, social learning labs, Futures Literacy labs and so on, so it is quite a hot topic. But the way we are looking at it is that it is not just about labs that create spaces, in which we do things with the folks who come along. It is also about creating spaces, where intimate conversations can occur. We are also working with the “more than human” and in that immersive sense of standing in a forest, standing in a field, or a paddock, or wherever, with somebody, and listening, and asking them to listen and talk to us about how they see their own embeddedness in the natural world. This is, of course, challenging, but at the same time, it is allowing for broader conversations to occur.

An example is the kind of work that Caitlin is doing in scope of AiR@USC, when she stands in a forest, with one ear in the planted hoop pine forest, which has got a certain vibration, a certain way of being, whereas the untouched natural forest, the wild on the other side, has quite a different feel. It is obviously less ordered, but it is also much more vibrant, because we are not domesticating a species en mass. The monocultural mind gets challenged by the chaos of the natural world, which of course, is not chaotic if you are an ecologist. You then know that there are deep orders that work in the natural world, but to our modernist worldview, it seems like these could be quite threatening, quite disordered.

All you said are quite interesting. Could you explain us the term anticipatory imagination a bit more?

Marcus: As I said, I am a historian, but I am also interested in the future, as a tool for thinking about, and responding to, issues in the present. So, “futures”, in plural, are very important in my thinking. The anticipatory imagination is referring to the stock of resources we have as individuals, and as communities, and as cultures, and even as civilizations, to respond to certain issues. The past is filled with all that we know: all our experiences, our sense of being, whether it is gender, culture, ethnicity… You know, those kinds of things that are given to us at birth, and we grow into those. But what we often do not do is reflect on our own culture. We do not reflect on our own conditioning. We do not ask ourselves about our traditions, what they enable and disable... So, the anticipatory imagination is using a sense of these things that are coming in the future. We can say that they are probable, or possible, sometimes they are just plausible, or maybe a science fiction scenario. We have got all these possibilities out there, and we can see the possibilities, clustering around some of those possibilities, will make many people quite anxious.

But the “anticipatory” is biologically-wired into our brains. Let’s take it away from humans for a minute. Birds know how to migrate. They know when the leaves start turning yellow, or whatever it is, and then they start migrating to where it is going to be warmer, or whatever it might be. So, there are biological clocks that will work in an anticipatory way. But, as we developed as human beings, we develop culture. Then, there are now cultural clocks in the modernist world, the world that we live in. It is very much a managerial world. It is about control, and it is about accountability, and so on.

But it is risk averse. We do not like risk. As an historian, I can say that the most interesting civilizational leaps have always occurred because people collectively have taken risks, and suddenly this new world appears! And it is a world that has many possibilities, and you will see different civilizations do different things, and different communities do different things. I cannot imagine what it must have been like in all those little places all around the world, where people suddenly started thinking “we are gonna plant seeds for next year”. That means I cannot eat all my seeds. Now I am gonna have to save some for next year. That is a very simplistic example, but it is the kind of thing that represents the anticipatory insight that since there is a “next year”, if we do this now, we will have that then.

So, to me that is at the heart of anticipatory imagination. And then, the work is to chart that, to find case studies, not just from the past, but case studies that are rich now in new imaginary possibilities. For instance, there is a wonderful British woman, Phoebe Tickell. She wrote an imagination manifesto about three or four years ago, and she has been working with local councils around reimagining: what it means to be a Council, what that community could be like. That kind of inspiring work is bubbling up all over the world. And when we are doing the work that Caitlin is doing, and the work that we are doing in Mistra EC, we are hacking cultural systems. We are seeing cultural systems as algorithms, you could say, and those algorithms are rich in possibility. But, we often get habituated into something because “this is the way it is done”. Does that make sense?

Yes Marcus, it makes a lot of sense. Thank you for this clear description of your work approach in the Mistra-EC programme, and the different frameworks that you use. Would you like to add anything else about the activities of the Work package 3?

Marcus: Yes, that would be fun, because I am currently working with a number of colleagues in writing this up for a journal article. As I am talking, I actually clarify a little bit more what is going on (chuckles). So, we have got a number of different kinds of labs running as we speak. And the way that we have come to understand them is using a futures tool: a two-by-two matrix, where we are looking at the a set of four themes; systematic versus system, and we are looking at ecological versus social. When we cross those, we end up with four quadrants (see image below). In one quadrant, we are working on “serious games”, and that is where there is some structure set up, built into the lab itself. This is around carbon farming. So, serious gaming around carbon farming is producing very interesting insights into the possibilities, but also the limitations, of an ordered process like that.

In this matrix, we also have the bottom right quadrant that looks at the “intimate”: intimate conversations, like talking to somebody in their kitchen. In the discourse and practice of labs, they generally do not go down to that level of scale. So, one of the things that we were thinking about is convergence across scale. We get people together in quite public spaces, such as the serious game space. But then, we also get people together in their safe spaces, where they can talk more on their own intimate knowledge about complex problems. Here they cluster around the kitchen table. Our colleague Sanna Barrineau has been running that, as well as the (bottom left quadrant), “immersive” lab, where she would stand with our farmers or other people in their field, in their forests, and invite them to engage with their environment.

As I said, that comes with a big question, and a tough one, because there is this beautiful language of the ethics-of-care and embedded ontologies in the natural world, the more-than-human world, and so on. There are some great works on that at the academic level, but the question is what does it actually mean, and how we do it? I think particularly, we, as researchers, are all very excited, but we are not going in there with anything other than curiosity: can we actually make meaning out of this space? That is a really important question.

And then finally, there is this more public space (top left quadrant), which is the one that I have been running, where we are talking not about carbon farming and things like that, but it is about death and body disposal. I am calling it “death futures”, and we're talking in a more World Cafe style, or open space style. We are using frameworks like that, and I am curating and hosting the conversation by presenting information on alternative burial practices, and so on. I have held a number of them, and there are quite different communities involved. We gather different stakeholders, people with different views. It is very hard to get people to talk about death, so what we are actually finding is that the people are really relieved to be able to talk about death in a way that is not stigmatised, or not constrained by the language of “he or she passed”, as opposed to “he died”. All languages have this. There is a kind of code to death, which sort of keeps it at a distance. We are looking into that, so that is another kind of lab, where we gather as a community to talk about things.

So, we have these labs. They are all co-creation labs, scaling from the natural, the intimate kitchen, the gathering -the one I am running- to the relatively structured serious games context. We are trying to see what emerges out of each kind of lab, as we understand it, but we are not going in there with answers, we are going, and not even looking for answers. We are looking for understandings about creating dialogical conversational processes. That is the work that we are currently engaged in, and it is really a very stimulating space to be working at.

How do you see the role of media and arts, the focus area that the WP5 team in Prague has been working on, in this entire dynamic?

Marcus: Well, first of all, media and the arts are parts of the anticipatory imagination I have been talking about. For me, there is a very strong theoretical overlap, because the media, particularly, is often responsible for defining the limits to which a conversation might go. It opens spaces, and it closes spaces.

The arts themselves are both complicit in the modern world, but also well-placed because of their cultural prestige and cultural clout to offer new ways of thinking about, and engaging with, the world. So, when we bring the arts to engage with thinking around environmental communication, we bring in the role of aesthetics, the role of curated conversations around processes that are not scientific, or are not curated in the way that we are curating context in our research work. They bring something new. I have always had great faith in creative practices and in imagination. The arts themselves are a crucible for social transformation. At every period in human history, the arts have had a major role -in maintaining a status quo, but also in charting new directions, aesthetic directions for societies themselves.

Thank you very much, Marcus for the wonderful conversation. Would you like to add anything?

Marcus: Well, for me, communication needs to be thought of as a cultural process that involves intimate conversations. It involves our inner world. We have not really talked about the subjective state. How many conversations do we have going on, in our own mind? That is just as important as how many conversations I have with my next door neighbour, or the people in my office, you know, people working in communities or governments, and so on. I think that is something that we have left out here, and we are trying to get it in our co-creation labs with the intimate space and the immersive space: the space of the kitchen table and the other.

What about nature? Can we also communicate with the nature?

Marcus: Well, that is what Sanna Barrineau, one of my co researchers, is working on, standing in the field or standing in a forest, listening, you know. Caitlin also talks about the sounds, and she is really interested in sonic qualities. Nature is actually very good at communicating, but we are not very good at listening. I think there is really an imbalance there. Since we privileged language, we privileged the so-called cultural processes. But, the way we have set culture up is opposite to nature, not really embedded in nature. It is a form of nature that is natural to human beings. The nature is, you know, the cockroaches in our kitchen and under the sink. Nature is all around us all the time, and COVID made that very clear. COVID was a brilliant messenger that said “hang on a second, you cannot separate the non-human, or the more-than-human, or whatever we want to call it, from the human: we are intimately bound” To me, that is a beautiful thing. And it is a very difficult realisation or challenge for cultures that have spent hundreds of years separating ourselves off from nature.

Thank you very much Marcus, for your time. It was very nice to have you in our Newsletter.