I was part of a team that worked on the holistic science masters and it's an amazing place. I'm really inspired by the work in V Taiwan and Audrey Tang, like these amazing examples where people are trying to make decisions in different ways. And so that is really what has led to me to moral imagination, which is, you know, a kind of imagination or what we've been referring to the work we do. It's also a term that's been around for like since the late 1700s. What's interesting to me about moral imagination is it's the combination of what is possible, but also what should happen.
How do we unlock the inherent creativity of people?
Imagination activist, Phoebe Tickell, founded Moral Imaginations to provide an imagination-based approach to systems change. A “renegade scientist”, Phoebe has spent the past year training the London borough of Camden in imagination activism. You can read their Phase One report here as they prepare for Phase Two of the project.
Phoebe joins me to discuss the role of imagination in activism, the universality of values in human culture, and the crisis of imagination within the current system. She details the Camden Imagines Project, explaining how 32 officers were trained in moral imagining and the startling impact this has had on the organisation and the borough, revealing some of the fascinating ideas councillors had once their imagination was unleashed.
“Human beings can operate in ways that are deeply loving, collaborative, imaginative, And our big challenge, I think right now, is that we've created an entire mega-structure of institutions, and ways of working, and policies and frameworks, and regulations that actually stop us from responding to the alive sense of what is needed and what we should do: what's needed, what we should do, what's possible. That's what moral imagination gestures at.”
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