Loftets bankettsal, Ultuna
How can Sweden get beyond polarized debates on land and land use? How can those who take care of Sweden’s land take different futures into account? How can Swedish society understand the variety of needs, possibilities, resources and challenges of what the landscape can be? And what new tendrils of possibility might be opened up if we do so?
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.
We welcome anyone with an interest in landscape and/or interdisciplinary methods for conversations. We are particularly interested in those whose voices are often unheard in discussions on land and its futures.
October 21st, 13:00-17:00
SLU Campus Ultuna, Loftets bankettsal
The event is run by The Society for Transformative Conversations. 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.
The Society is led and run by Professor Keri Facer, Pernilla Glaser and Åsa Berggren, professor of ecology at SLU. The society is funded by the August T Larsson Visiting Researcher Programme at SLU and SLU Future Food.
Keri Facer, professor of educational and social futures at the University of Bristol and is currently an August T Larsson visiting researcher at SLU for three years.
Pernilla Glaser, educator, facilitator, therapist, experience-designer and writer. Her expertise is pedagogy, leadership and collaborative practices for heterogeneous teams.
Keri has worked in interdisciplinary research settings for 25 years – across engineering, arts and social sciences – and has held a number of leadership roles in national interdisciplinary research programmes and universities. She is currently heading up a 14-country interdisciplinary programme on ‘Times of Just Transitions’ bringing together artists, social scientists, political scientists and humanities scholars. She was Zennström Professor in Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University from 2018-2020.
The core of the 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. Read more about the project here: Listen better to each other – as a pathway to sustainable societies
The first meeting organised by the Society took place at Ullbo, Ultuna, 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. Read more about that day here: You never know the consequences of one conversation.
Travelling to Uppsala from another SLU campus?
For SLU employees travelling from other campuses, SLU Future Food (futurefood@slu.se) will reimburse travel expenses up to SEK 4500 per occasion.
For questions or more information, please contact Jasmine Zhang, jasmine.zhang@slu.se
For questions or more information, please contact Jasmine Zhang, jasmine.zhang@slu.se.
SLU Future Food
www.slu.se/futurefood
futurefood@slu.se