Open Call - Mutant Futures Program

The program will be undertaken as part of the Curiouser and Curiouser, cried Alice: Rebuilding Janus from Cassandra and Pollyanna (CCA) and thus there are no costs to participants. While there is no financial cost, we do expect all participants to be present and focussed for the two days of the workshop. We would like you to send a short motivational text of why you would like to participate, along with your CV, to workshops@timesup.org by 8th of April.

Consider such questions as: what social challenges touch your heart? What is a vulnerability and/or need that you feel? Do you feel that "Necessity is the mother of invention" in these times? Please include something personal as well. Participation is open to all. We anticipate that early to mid career practitioners will gain the most from it, as will graduate students or those close to graduation. However we are sure that all can gain much in the workshop, from high school students to retirees. Futures need us all. Please do not hesitate to get in contact if you have any questions.

The mutant futures program is a course developed to support practitioners, change makers, professionals and innovators in stepping up their creative impact in the world, their communities, organizations and in their lives. Our capacity to align our sense of purpose to societal changes is critical. From this foundation we can forge new methods that can address our challenges and create change in new, more powerful ways.

Our images of the future which guide our assumptions for action and planning are often inherited unconsciously. Often it is the presumed or predicted future, or an unreflected vision. There are, however, many possible futures: probable, plausible and possible, with preferred futures scattered among them. By challenging old assumptions about the future and opening our awareness to alternative futures (such as through the futures cone), we move away from the predicted future and begin to move towards others. Mutating the future is finding a niche, a leverage point, a target where we want to create change: by mutating some small element of the present, seeing the present as a biological substrate, the DNA and all that stuff from which the future develops; by acting differently, we begin to change the sort of future we might end up in.

Humans are methodological beings. To be human is to create tools, methods, strategies and practices by which we shape the world and ourselves. We also exist in communities of practice, where we are able to discuss and hone our practices. We use our practices in order to work and play, to deal with everyday life and special situations. We are designers, builders, organisers, mathematicians, artists, sociologists, programmers and a thousand other roles. These practices have emerged over various time spans, we have created and learnt them in schools, workshops, manuals and from each other.

A mutant futurist is not a futurist with green skin and too many eyes, rather a mutant futurist is someone who has allowed the needs of the future and the challenges facing our world to mutate their practices. They have used the disjunctive, post normal and epic nature of our times to call forth new selves and new methods to shape the world and address the problems that touch us most deeply. They have also decentred their practice to open the space for methodological hybridity, to receive all the possibility for creativity to be found within a particular domain.

Our Selves are made up of a lot of smaller personality fragments, so-called personas. There is a persona who will speak in public, another for pillow talk, one for playing with small children and another for confronting injustice. Some of our personas get overridden by others; we are too quick to talk, so our listener persona gets ignored, or we take so much time listening and balancing that we forget to say what is important for us individually or to bring our expertise to the table. The class clown ignores their poet, the visual artist their mechanic. Mutating the Self, as part of the Mutant Futures approach, involves discovering ignored, latent and under-expressed personas and bringing to the fore those personas that will be most helpful.

But helpful for what? Once again we end up with the desired future mutations. Efforts alone are often less than useful, so the MFP refers to social and other movements that exist and that we can ally ourselves with. We live in Epic Times and the times are calling forth new selves from us.

The MFP learns a lot from the field of Action Research, encouraging practitioners to observe and determine processes within their practices, to share and amplify these observations and improvements, within the context of those practices. With new generations of activists and futures practitioners emerging with divergent bodies of background knowledge and practice behind them, this ability to share insights and to learn from the community of practice is vital.

• Mutant Futures Program

• Answering the Call of Epic Times

• Jose Ramos “Messy Grace: The Mutant Futures Program” in “Phenomonologies of Grace” M. Bussey and C. Mozzini-Alister, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

• Jose Ramos “Mutant Futurists in the 21st Century” 2013

• Anticipatory Experimentation

• Stone H, Stone S. Embracing our selves: The voice dialogue manual. New World Library; 1989.

• Bill Sharpe et al “Three horizons: a pathways practice for transformation.” Ecology and Society 21(2):47

• Mutant Futures Program: What selves is the future asking us to grow?

• The Mutant Futures Program: Self-Discovery and Alignment

• The Mutant Futures Program: Methodological Hybridity and Creativity