How Dare You (HDY) revolves around developing and maintaining hopeful visions for futures in spite of and in full awareness of the difficulties that we are facing. The climate emergency, geopolitical tensions and resource limits are a few of the fundamental risks we face. Closing our eyes to these threats is a brutal form of denial. Our times are VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Our times are ripe for Arts Thinking to face up to these developments. We need to learn. We need Volition, Understanding, Choice and Agency; intrinsic features of Arts Thinking and arts-based research.
The provocative question, recently posed to us: “How dare you be utopian, visionary and positive in devastating times like ours?” along with impulses emerging from current research, lead us to our Research Question: “How to maintain hopeful and positive visions in times like ours?” The core assumption, contrary to hypernormalisation and solutionism, is that we do in fact live in times of great change, opportunity and danger.