Welcome to Episode 20 of From What If to What Next. This feels like a bit of a landmark for us, our twentieth episode! Thank you for joining me on this journey. Do tell your friends to come join us...  Any reflections on how you're finding the journey so far are most welcome. Seems like a good moment for that. 

The good news is that we have saved one of the very finest episodes to mark this moment. Today we are exploring the question of trauma, and I must confess that recording this conversation rather blew my mind, as it will no doubt blow yours. I had to lie down afterward and digest it for a while. I am joined by two amazing thinkers for this conversation. I hope you love it. 



Susan Raffo is a bodyworker, cultural worker and writer. For the last 15 years she has focused her work through the lens of healing justice with a particular interest in supporting individual and collective practices of safety and wellness. This also means attending to how generational and historical trauma shapes the present moment , including both internalized and systemic supremacy. She spent her first seven years of adulthood living in Bristol, England, particularly shaped by the anti-imperialism and sustainability movements of the 1980s (the protests at Greenham Common being an especially life-shaping experience). She has lived in south Minneapolis in the US for 30 years with her awesome partner, Rocki, and their daughter, Luca.

Staci K. Haines is a national leader in the field of Somatics, specializing in intersecting personal and social change. Staci is the co-founder of generative somatics, a multiracial social justice organization bringing somatics to social and climate justice leaders and organizations. She specializes in somatics and trauma, and leads programs for healers, therapists, and social change leaders to transform the impact of individual and social trauma and violence. Her new book The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice (North Atlantic Press 2019) is based on that work. She is the founder of generationFIVE, a community based organization whose mission is to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations.

Both are phenomenal, and I am so grateful to them for coming on the podcast. My thanks as always to Ben Addicott for his production skills and our theme tune, to you for subscribing and making all of this possible, and please do leave your thoughts below. As mentioned in the podcast, Staci and Susan sent in the list of recommended readings, which I will copy below: 

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping World, We will not cancel us, and other dreams of transformative justice and Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown. 

My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem.

Fumbling Towards Repair: A workbook for community accountability facilitators by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan.

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha and Ejeris Dixon.

The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing and Social Justice by Staci K. Haines.

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity during this crisis and the next by Dean Spade.

Love and Rage, the path of liberation through anger by Lama Rod Owens

Transform Harm: a website with many resources about Transformative Justice and ending violence

Finding Our Way Podcast, by Prentis Hemphill

Zehr Institute on Panel Transformative Justice with Ejeris Dixon, RJ Maccanni, and Nathan Shara. Video. 

Zehr Institute on Panel Transformative Justice with Ejeris Dixon, RJ Maccanni, and Nathan Shara. Video. 

Two Feathers Native American Family Services. "Healing the Soul Wound" with Dr. Eduardo Duran. April 10, 2020.  His life’s work has been in Native American postcolonial psychology. Video.

Episode Twenty: What if we addressed the trauma that lies beneath the world's problems?

This is such an incredible episode. One of those ones I had to go off and sit under a tree afterwards to absorb. Today we talk about gender. I grew up in a society that thought in terms of two genders, you were male or you were female. This was accompanied by expectations that men behaved in ways that were ‘masculine’, and women in ways seen as being ‘feminine’… If you were someone who didn’t identify as either, or someone who challenged society’s expectations of what being masculine or feminine meant, it was a bleak time. And in many cultures, far bleaker still, indeed very dangerous.

Some cultures recognise a ‘third’ gender, but what would it be like if we were to see gender instead as a spectrum, and where you choose to place yourself on that spectrum is up to you, and can change as often as you like? What if society accommodated, supported, nurtured even, such a degree of fluidity? What if everyone could be who they wanted to be, to define themselves however they wanted to, and the kind of abuse so many LGBTQI+ people experience was instead replaced by a culture that valued people wherever they are across the spectrum. What wonders might such an approach unlock in our culture? 

Syd Yang is the Senior Advisor for Healing Justice and Wellness at Movement Voter Project. Syd's work finds its resonance in the stories we each hold at the intersection of memory, body, sexuality and mental health. Syd works primarily with queer and trans BIPOC individuals as well as regularly leads workshops, community healing circles and has been a group facilitator for over two decades, with a specific focus on grief, healing ancestral trauma, sexuality + spirituality, body liberation and eating disorder recovery. 

Mahfam Malek has held many roles in justice movements over the years, including facilitator, somatic coach, non-profit staff of many stripes, social justice-oriented stand-up comic, direct-action and cultural organizer, environmental educator, and more. In addition to training, facilitating, and coaching, they write, organize with a group of abolitionist diasporic Iranians, hang out with their dog, and chat on the phone nearly daily about absolutely nothing with their parents. They are also the Training and Operations Director at the Chicago Torture Justice Center.

I really hope you find something very special in this discussion. My thanks to Syd and Mahfam, and also to you for supporting what we do here, and Ben Addicott, who so beautifully records, edits, produces and embellishes these podcasts. See you next time.

Episode Thirty One: What if the future were non-binary?

Today’s episode of From What If to What Next is about care. Care has been very much on our minds of recent. COVID has highlighted how vitally important care is and yet how undervalued it is. It is so often seen as being the domain of women, and around the world it is often either underpaid, or unpaid work. As the populations of the Global North live longer and longer, and as young people are unable to afford, often, to leave home, it tends to often fall to women to care for both the younger and the older generations simultaneously, what is sometimes called the ‘Sandwich Generation’.

Many people are happy to stand on their doorsteps and clap for those who provide the care in our society, but not to really value care, not to campaign for it to be truly valued. These days of COVID have the potential to be a real watershed moment. So in today's episode, with two extraordinary women, we're asking "what if care work was valued?” This is an episode that might very well lead to inner paradigm shifts... 

Kavita Ramdas is a recognized global advocate for intersectional gender equity and justice. She currently serves as the Director of the Women’s Rights Program at the Open Society Foundations. She also serves on a few select non-profit advisory boards, the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the board of directors of GRIST, a publicly supported journalism non-profit focused on climate justice.

Ai-jen Poo is an award-winning organizer, author, and a leading voice in the women’s movement. She is the Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Director of Caring Across Generations, Co-Founder of SuperMajority, Co-Host of Sunstorm podcast and a Trustee of the Ford Foundation. Ai-jen is a nationally recognized expert on elder and family care, the future of work, and what’s at stake for women of color. She is the author of the celebrated book, The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.

From What If to What Next: Episode Thirty Five.

Oh wow, you're in for a treat. Today we bring together Anthea Lawson, author of the fabulous new book 'The Entangled Activist' and Alastair McIntosh, author of 'Soul and Soil' and 'Riders on the Storm'. I usually try to constrain the conversations we have here to around 45 minutes, but this one was so fascinating that we just kept rolling, and just kept chatting, and so this one actually comes in at an hour and a quarter! But you'll love it I promise, and you'll wish we'd kept going. I'm not going to tell you anything else, just that you will love it, and I so look forward to your reflections and comments.

From What If to What Next: Episode 36

I'm not going to say much about this episode, other than that it's incredible. We are exploring Afrofuturism, which has been variously described as “speculative fiction from the African diaspora”, “a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens” and “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation”. It has so much to teach us about imagination and how to keep What If questions alive over time. You will also hear the story of the Zambian Space Programme (a new one on me) which is just amazing. 

My guests are both amazing. Dr. Priscilla Layne is Associate Professor of German and Adjunct Associate Professor of African Diaspora Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, was published in 2018 by the University of Michigan Press. She has also published essays on Turkish German culture, translation, punk and film. She recently translated Olivia Wenzel's debut novel, 1000 Serpentinen Angst, which will be out next year. And she is currently finishing a manuscript on Afro German Afrofuturism.

Dr. Dennis Chester is Professor of African American Literature at California State University East Bay (CSUEB) in Hayward CA.  His interests include all manner of topics related to African American literature and culture with specialties in the Harlem Renaissance and in contemporary genre studies.  Dr. Chester's recent activities include published articles on African American crime fiction and presentations on Afrofuturism and the characteristics of Black speculative fiction.  A recent Fulbright fellow, Dr. Chester is also very interested in the diasporic aspects of contemporary Black writing and exploring the ways that Black literature and Black people move within and across national borders.

I hope you love this, and do let me know what you think. And thanks, as ever, to Ben Addicott for making it all sound so great.

From What If to What Next: Episode 40

The IPCC report that came out in mid-2021 said “unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5 degrees, or even 2 degrees, will be beyond reach”. “Immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions”. Let’s imagine we were able to actually do that in the time available to us.

It would mean the complete reimagining of food, travel, housing, the economy. A retooled education system. A new sense of shared and collective purpose. It would feel like living through a revolution of the imagination. But what would it actually feel like to live through a revolution of the imagination? It's a question that leads us to our question for today’s episode – what if we are standing on the cusp of an Imagination Age? It was a question inspired by this article I read that one of our guests had written about the second guest. 

Gabriel A. Silva, who wrote it, is a Professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Department of Neurosciences in the School of Medicine at the University of California San Diego. He holds a Jacobs Family Scholar in Engineering Endowed Chair, is the Founding Director of the Center for Engineered Natural Intelligence, and Associate Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. In addition to his academic work, he is a regular contributor to Medium and Forbes. 

And Rita J. King, who it's about, believes in Applied Imagination for creative, pragmatic problem solving in the Imagination Age. King is EVP for Business Development at Science House, a strategic consultancy in Manhattan. She is a writer, researcher, speaker, designer and artist. As a Futurist at the National Academy of Sciences Science and Entertainment Exchange, she invents novel technologies, characters and stories for film and TV projects. She is a Resident Research Fellow at the Center for Engineered Natural Intelligence at UC San Diego.

I hope you love this conversation and where it goes and, as always, do let us know what you think! Thanks.

From What If to What Next: Episode 42

Welcome to Episode 41 of 'From What If to What Next'. Powerful psychology is used to convince us, often subliminally, that we want and need things we previously never knew even existed. This is especially dangerous at a time when we need to urgently cut consumption of high carbon-generating products and lifestyle choices. It is estimated that in the UK companies spend over £23bn a year on advertising.

Research shows that the more advertising we are exposed to, the more unhappy we feel, the more materialistic, the less we engage in positive social activities and the less we care about the environment. Advertising, in other words, is incompatible with the decarbonisation we so urgently need.

There is a very real, and dangerous, link between living in cities overrun with cars and the fact that we are surrounded by billboards and newspaper stuffed with seductive car ads. What if instead those spaces presented us with different messages, messages celebrating more inclusive cities with far less cars, cities with clean air, cities rich with biodiversity - messages that told different stories? Our What If question for today then is … “What if we reclaimed our public spaces from advertising?”

My two guests on this episode bring a huge amount to this conversations. Rosa ter Kuile is Campaigns and Communications manager at Rising Arts Agency. and is part of the Bristol Womxns Mural Collective. Robbie Gillett works part-time from Bristol on Possible’s Badvertising campaign (you can find some of their excellent publications here) and at Adfree Cities. More about their work at these links. 

I hope this episode will help you to see the spaces around you differently, to reimagine what your corner of the world would look like without adverts, and how that might impact your imagination. As always, do let me know what you think. And thanks to Ben Addicott for making it all sound so great.

From What If to What Next: Episode 41

Although not planned as some kind of 'Christmas Special', that's kind of what this episode is, so hopefully it will give you the opportunity to treat your imagination to something very special over the festive season. This episode will introduce you to Flora Collingwood-Norris and to Orsola de Castro, cofounder and Global Creative Director of Fashion Revolution.   Flora's book is 'Visible Creative Mending for Knitwear', and Orsola's book is 'Loved Clothes last: How the Joy of Rewearing and Repairing Your Clothes Can Be a Revolutionary Act'. I  hope this episode inspires much stitching and loving repairing.

From What If to What Next: Episode 43

Here's Episode 45 for you, I hope you're going to love it. Meet Tim Gill and Alice Ferguson of Playing Out, brilliant guests for a vital discussion. Today we're talking about kids, and play and about the places where we live.  Kids have almost entirely vanished from our streets. Retreating indoors in the face of the car’s domination of our city spaces, and a perception of the lack of safety, kids are all too often starved of play. ‘No ball games here’ signs. Horrible noises only audible to teenagers to chase them away from sitting near certain buildings, The privatisation of public space. Cities are increasingly being designed around the needs of adults and capital rather than kids. So what might we do about it? Some beautiful visions of the future from our Time Machine adventure this week. I hope you love it. Do let me know what you think.....

From What If to What Next: Episode 45

Welcome to 2022. We start this year with a fantastic episode and a really important question. What if we were to implement every solution that we already know exists in order to tackle the climate crisis the sense of urgency that an emergency should inspire? After the damp squib of COP26, it's a vitally important question. Can we do it? Is there still time? And most importantly, what would it feel like to live in a time when that was actually happening, when all around us, all hands were applied to this most momentous of tasks? It's not a question we ask often enough. 

And it is a big question. Joining me for the first episode of this year are Clover Hogan and Paul Hawken, both brilliant thinkers on this question. Paul's book. 'Regeneration', which we refer to throughout the podcast, can be bought here (never Amazon). Do let me know what you think of this episode, of thoughts for future What If questions it raises for you, or anything else it inspires in you. And Happy New Year!

From What If to What Next: Episode 44

Here is a short piece to introduce a new project I'm doing with the amazing Mr Kit: https://kitmusic.bandcamp.com/  Watch this space!

Introducing 'Field Recordings from the Future'

What would a car-free, low carbon, delicious future sound like? I visited the Vauban in Freiburg to find out.

A taste of the Vauban

I was in Utrecht recently, to record, for 'Field Recordings from the Future', the rush hour of bicycles. Here is a taste of that.

The Utrecht bicycle rush hour.

2030 Field Recordings of Cornish beavers

Mary-Jayne is an art therapist and Jungian analyst in private practice in North London. Alongside this, she lectures and facilitates workshops on Ecopsychology in a wide range of settings.  http://www.mjrust.net/  Here she talks to Transition Network's Rob Hopkins. 

An interview with ecopsychologist Mary-Jayne Rust

Here is the sound created by Ben Addicott to use for online events to signal the transition between the present day and the near future. Feel free to use but please do credit where you got it from.

Time Machine sound effect

In the courtyard of Civic Square in Birmingham, Immy Kaur and Rob Hopkins discussed the core ideas in his book 'How to Fall in Love with the Future', the power of community-led development, and much more. 

Rob Hopkins and Immy Kaur in conversation. Civic Square, 16th July 2025

Cormac is Managing Director of Nurture Development and a faculty member of the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) Institute at Northwestern University, Chicago. He has trained communities, agencies, NGOs and governments in ABCD and other strengths based approaches in Kenya, Southern Sudan, South Africa, the UK, Ireland, Canada and Australia.  He also gave a great TEDx talk that we loved.  Here he talks to Transition Network's Rob Hopkins.

Cormac Russell on Asset Based Community Development

Martin Shaw is a mythologist, author and storyteller. He is regarded as one of the most outstanding new teachers of the mythic imagination. He is  a Visiting Fellow at Schumacher College, and has devised and led the Oral Tradition course at Stanford University in the U.S.  Any exploration of the imagination, its current state of health, and how we might best interact with it should include beating a path to the door of Martin Shaw (that sounded far more poetic than was intended).  Which, a few weeks ago, one sunny Spring morning, I did.

Martin Shaw on Imagination

As the research stage of the book I am writing on imagination wraps up, it was a real treat recently to chat to Donna Rose Addis, a Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Auckland. One of the areas I’ve been researching, as a complete novice to neuroscience, has been what happens in our brains when we imagine.  I had read several papers she had written about the similarities between imagination and memory, our abilities to recall the past, and to imagine the future.

Donna Rose Addis on the hippocampus, the future and brain networks

I recently taught at Schumacher College, and spoke about the work I am doing about imagination.  Afterwards, a few students came up to me and said "you must speak to Vanessa Andreotti"!   She had, earlier that week, Skyped into the class, and presented her thinking about imagination, among other things.  So I tracked her down and got in touch, and we had the following fascinating conversation.  Vanessa is a Professor, and is the Canada Research Chair in Race, Inequalities and Global Change at the University of British Columbia.  
She has a particular interest in education for, and about, international development, in global citizenship education, in global justice and in the ethics of internationalization.  I started out by ask

Vanessa Andreotti on imagination and how our dreams are tamed

They say you should never meet your heroes.  They’re wrong. I recently had the huge honour of spending almost an hour in conversation with Robert MacFarlane, author of 9 books including ‘Mountains of the Mind’, ‘The Old Ways’, ‘Landmarks’ and, most recently, ‘The Lost Words’.  I have admired Robert’s work for many years, in particular his reflections on imagination and his determination to keep alive, in our minds and our culture, a whole library of words which help us better articulate our place in, and relationship with, the natural world.  As well as being a writer, Robert teaches at Cambridge about language and landscape.  As he told me, “the convergences of those two things, along with social justice and environmental justice, are the things I’ve written most about”.

Robert Macfarlane: "the metaphors we use deliver us hope, or they foreclose possibility"

Stuart Candy is a professional futurist and is an Associate Professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His collaborative Experiential Futures practice brings possible scenarios to life through the creation of tangible artifacts and immersive situations which give people a very real taste of how different versions of the future might turn out. As you’ll hear he playfully brings future scenarios alive in the present, through collaborations with designers, artists, actors, activists, businesses and more, and he has worked in many different places.  He was recently at the Transition Design Symposium at Dartington, and I took the opportunity to sit under a tree in the shade on a gloriously sunny day for the following fascinating conversation with Stuart about the future, the imagination and the creative approaches he has developed.

Stuart Candy on imagination and being a futurist

What happens when play disappears from our cities?  In a report for the National Trust, Stephen Moss writes "a potential impact is that children who don't take risks become adults who don't take risks".  One response is the Playable City movement.  It defines a Playable City as "a city where people, hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places and story".  It's a movement that started in Bristol, and believes that "by encouraging public activities that actively bring joy, we can create a happier, more cohesive urban future".  Examples thus far, in Bristol, have included a 300ft waterslide on one of the city's steepest shopping streets, a zombie chase around the city centre, and lampposts you can interact with.  The idea has since spread around the world to cities including Tokyo, Seoul, Lagos and Austin.  I spoke to Hilary O’Shaughnessy, Producer for Playable City, who leads on the delivery of Playable City projects, based at the Watershed in Bristol.  I started by asking her what is a Playable City?

Hilary O'Shaughnessy on the Playable City

The initial spark that set me off thinking that I needed to write a book about imagination was reading a study by a professor at College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia, whose name is Kyung Hee Kim, known as ‘K’ to her friends (because they kept getting her full name wrong).  K is originally from Korea, and came to the US in 2000. She already had a Masters and a PhD from her time in Korea, but when she came to the US she did a second PhD under the supervision of Dr Ellis Paul Torrance, known as the ‘Father of Creativity’.  Torrance created the famous Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, known as ‘the gold standard of creativity testing’.  He passed away in 2003, but K has since continued her research into creativity.

Kyung Hee Kim on 'The Creativity Crisis'

One of the best books I read this summer was Stephen Duncombe’s ‘Dream: re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy’.  Written during the last days of the presidency of George W. Bush, it was a plea for progressive politics to embrace imagination, spectacle, wit, sensuality and what one reviewer called “a joyful aesthetic of dissent”. I loved the book’s assertion that “unless progressives acknowledge and accept a politics of imagination, desire and spectacle, and, most important, make it ethical and make it our own, we will bring about our “ruin rather than preservation”.

Stephen Duncombe on imagination,  spectacle and desire.

Although the inquiry at the heart of my research on imagination is framed around the idea that we are, collectively, experiencing a decline in our collective imagination, not everyone I have interviewed agrees.  Marjorie Taylor is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon and author of ‘Imaginary Companions and the Children who Create Them’, and editor of the Oxford Book of the Development of Imagination. She researches the development of imagination and creativity, in particular on childhood imaginary friends, and also the relationships that adult fiction writers develop with characters in their novels.  Much of her work is conducted in the beautifully-named ‘Imagination Lab’.  She is on the editorial boards of the journals ‘Imagination, Cognition, and Personality’ and ‘The American Journal of Play’.

Marjorie Taylor on the childhood imagination: "I have not seen a decline"

Welcome to this, the first ever episode of 'From What If to What Next'.  In this first episode, we meet singer, curator, event creator and lover of birdsong Sam Lee, speaking to us direct from a birdsong-filled forest, and Mya-Rose Craig, also known as 'Birdgirl', who is doing amazing work promoting birdwatching among young people and promoting BME engagement with the natural world. 

Subscribe to this podcast at www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and get it a full two weeks before everyone else, PLUS a subscribers-only podcast called 'The Ministry of Imagination', PLUS other treats such as my recent conversation with permaculture co-founder David Holmgren AND the opportunity to ask the What If questions that shape these episodes. All for just £3 a month.

From What If to What Next: Episode One.

Of all the 17 episodes of this podcast so far, this is the one that I had to go off somewhere quiet afterwards for a while to digest. It is a very powerful and fascinating discussion. My two guests are extraordinary, and I feel so blessed that they could make the time to join me in this wonderful What If exploration. 

Sherri Mitchell (Weh’na Ha’mu’ Kwasset (She Who Brings the Light)) is an attorney, an activist, an advisor, a speaker and so so so much more, including author of ‘Sacred Instructions: indigenous wisdom for living spirit-based change’. She was born and raised on the Penobscot Indian Reservation.

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who belongs to the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. His recent book, Sand Talk: how indigenous thinking can save the world, is deeply wonderful and I am very much enjoying it right now.

Our discussion focused around the question ‘what if indigenous wisdom could save the world?’, and I hope it blows your mind as much as it did mine. I would recommend taking some time after you’ve listened to it to go for a walk and digest it. It worked for me.

Episode Seventeen: What if indigenous wisdom could save the world?

Drucilla Cornell is a professor of law, women's studies and political science at Rutgers University.  After reading a brilliant article she wrote about the public imagination, I got in touch, and here is the conversation we had.

Rob Hopkins

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