Society for transformative conversations

Keri Facer, who is professor of Educational and Social Futures at the University of Bristol, as well as current holder of the August T Larsson visiting professorship at SLU, is leading the project together with Åsa Berggren, professor of Ecology at SLU.

Much of society today, including academia, is characterized by competition. Many of us concentrate on communicating our own messages rather than investing time and effort into listening to and considering other people’s contributions to discussions.

But true democracy also entails engaging in the stories and experiences not so often considered. Not listening to those without strong voices, may also lead to lost opportunities.

This transdisciplinary project looks for ways to spark transformative conversations; those where the participants’ curiosity and vulnerability open up for the unexpected and new insights that thrive on openness, trust and respect. In our work we are looking to develop a scientifically-based method for a new form of discussions.

The project involves people inside and outside of SLU to understand how transformative conversations occur and how we may best harvest the ideas that emerge. A small workshop with transformative conversations in 2023 will be followed by another and much bigger one in late 2024.

"The society is a utopian experiment. It aims to open up new conversations about the futures of land, food and human-more-than-human relationships through innovative convening practices. The society will be exploring, over three years, ways of opening conversations that enable dialogue across different communities, across different forms of knowledge, across different life experiences. We will be studying how we can have better, richer, more generative conversations that learn from collective and diverse sources of wisdom, challenge assumptions and open up new ways of thinking and knowing and being in the world. We will take conversation seriously as a foundational practice that shapes so much of our life and world and ask how we might learn to converse in ways that are adequate to the current time."

Project dates: 2023 - 2026

Target groups: Open to everyone that wants to participate

Funding: A T Larsson visiting professor programme and SLU Future Food

Contact: For any further information about this project, please contact asa.berggren@slu.se or Keri.Facer@bristol.ac.uk.

More about the project

Listen better to each other – as a pathway to sustainable societies.
Professors Åsa Berggren and Keri Facer work together to develop methods for more democratic communication. The core of their joint project is to improve our ability to truly listen to each other and take in the perspectives of others, on the road to a more sustainable society.

”You never know the consequences of one conversation.” Keri Facer was one of the organizers of an interdisciplinary day at Ullbo in Uppsala on November 15th 2023. The aim of the day was to discover new kind of conversations about future food and how we use the landscape.

Creating Living Knowledge: Lessons learned from an 8 year programme of transdisciplinary research. Keri Facer, professor of the Educational and Social Futures program at the University of Bristol shares her experiences from the UK's Connected Communities programme in this lunch webinar for SLU Future Food on April 3rd 2024 (watch on YouTube).

The Conversation Circle: Facilitators Training for New Conversations. The Society for Transformative Conversations invites you to a free training for facilitators, with a focus on interdisciplinary and exploratory conversations. Followed by a live opportunity to put that training into practice at one of the Society’s events: the Land Futures Salon, on October 21st 2024.

Tendril Talk: the Land Futures Salon. Event on October 21st, 2024. The Society for Transformative Conversations invites you to a different sort of conversation about land - an afternoon of interdisciplinary dialogues that bring together researchers, civil society, artists, future generations, policy makers and research funders.