Education in the Anthropocene Series: what radical acts of being and becoming can we dare to undertake to reimagine our collective future in a dangerous world?

Considering the enormity of the challenge that is living well in the Anthropocene, we face the compounding struggles of fighting off despair, apathy, exhaustion, and deep disempowerment. Cole suggests we seek escape routes from the circular systems that keep us trapped. How then do we create pathways out of this capture in ways that sustain life and possibility?

One of our greatest challenges in a post truth world is to find new ways to speak, to create, and to truly be heard, that pierce through the cacophony of voices so we do not remain isolated in timid silos. If we do not find our voices now, if we do not speak up while we still can, our capacity to dissent may vanish altogether.

This stakeholder event will encourage us to question our own and others power in our lives and what we can do where we are standing right now to effect life sustaining change in our local spaces. What everyday individual and collective creative acts of expression like art making, storytelling, gardening, gathering, wondering, can we call on to be our radical spaces of being and becoming.

This session invites participants to explore three urgent questions:

How can we, as educators, creatives, community members, and industry partners, start from where we are right now to push back against the great silencing and build cohesive, life-sustaining communities?
What small but significant radical acts of creativity and solidarity can we undertake to keep hoping, keep going, and carve out spaces for authentic expression and collective transformation, even when it feels safer to stay small?
Being alive is itself the most creative act, yet does our drive for creativity and discovery also stretch the bounds of planetary resources?

Our individual and collective creative acts have the power to become more than art. They become forces that articulate truths too dangerous or too complex for ordinary speech. They become vehicles for solidarity, clandestine mementos of shared meaning that offer light in the dark. Whether through storytelling, ritual, painting, dance, or community gatherings, creative cultural practices can be radical interventions that defy oppressive narratives and open space for new ways of knowing, feeling, and being. Like artistic creation itself, fluid, porous, alive, the university was once a site for radical thinking and freedom of thought. How might we begin again, together, to reimagine education as a place for exploring what is possible?