Society for transformative conversations

SLU Future Food supports the Society for transformative conversations, a project and initiative aiming to contribute to a more democratic communication by developing methods that can be used in society. Improving our ability to really listen to one another and to grasp the perspectives of others are at the very core of the project, as a way to a more sustainable society.

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.

About the society

"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."

To explore the society, visit the project web page:

https://www.conversationsociety.org/