2 July, 2024, 12:00-20:00 UK

This year's theme, the Role of Imagination in Times of Collapse, brings to the center the spirit of creativity through the wisdom of thought leaders, cutting-edge perspectives, and new visions in service of life for emerging worlds. We welcome you to join us at the 3rd Imagination Infrastructure, curated by Alixa García and hosted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

You can sign up for tickets here.

Programme (times listed are all BST)

12:00 - The Role Of Imagination in Times of Collapse - Keynote by Alixa García

12:35 - Indigenous Ancestral Technology, Plant Medicine and a New Imagination

Featured on this panel:

Ismail Lourido Ali, J.D., is the Director of Policy and advocacy at the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and supports the design, development, and implementation of psychedelic policy reform across the country and the world. Ismail co-founded and co-chairs the Board of the Psychedelic Bar Association and is licensed to practice law in the state of California. 

Claudia Cuentas: is a registered therapist, cultural director, and Instructor at Alma Institute, a place for psychedelic therapeutic training that promotes an equitable, accessible, and culturally sensitive psychedelic healing ecosystem.

Julian Jaramillo: is a registered therapist and trained Shaman in wisdom traditions from Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru.

13:35 - Post Capitalist Futures: Regeneration, Reciprocity, Solidarity

Featured on this panel:

Alnoor Ladha: Alnoor focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, cultural change, and narrative work. He's the council chair of Culture Hacks Labs, a cooperatively run advisory for social movements and progressive organizations to create cultural interventions for systems change. Ladha is co-author of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: The Healing of Wealth in the Time of Collapse.

Dr. Priscilla Ferreira: is an Afro-Brazilian feminist, abolitionist, and social justice Educator. She is a Professor of Geography and Latinx & Caribbean at Rutgers University, and her work focuses on activism and Black solidarity economies, Black geographies, Afro-Latinx feminisms, and community-engaged pedagogies and scholarship.

Samir L Doshi, Ph.D.: is the Director at CS Fund and Race and Technology Fellow at Stanford University's Digital Civil Society Lab. Senior scientist, policy advisor, and organizer with 20 years of experience in food and land sovereignty, climate justice, humanitarian response, and community resilience to center equity and power building for Global Majority communities to advance a Just Transition. 

Rachel Bagby, an advisor and instigator of cultural change, is the author of Daughterhood: sounding/hidden truths/ignite your freedom. Bagby is vibralingually devoted to bringing full attention to what's actually true in support of beloved communities of praxis caring for land and each other.

14:35 - Queering Linear Thought

Featured on this Panel:

Celeste Lecesne:  Award-winning playwright, author, and actor. Creator of "Trevor" the play and Oscar winning short. Co-Founder of The Trevor Project and The Future Perfect Project. 

Sa'ed Atshan: Professor at Swarthmore College and Author of Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique.

Alia Lahlou: Is an internationally renowned social justice facilitator with 15 years of professional experience in organizational development, mediation, Non-Violent Communication, leadership and collaborative skills training, and other healing and community-building modalities. Alia is from Morocco, lives in New York, and has worked in nearly 20 countries on five continents.

15:20 Break 

15:45 - Collective Imagination Practice Community Learning Session

We will hear from a growing global community and fund with over 800 practitioners. 

16:40 - The Ultimate Imagination: Another kind of Death and Dying

Featured on this Panel

Tonya Abernathy is a death doula with 25 years of experience in the field. She is also a singer and Musical Director of the Death Choir.

Sarah Cavanaugh: is an author, artist, facilitator, and host of Peaceful Exit Podcast.

Jodie Buller: is a cemetery director who centers ecological burials and reimagines a return to the Earth. She has been the Cemetery Director for White Eagle Memorial Preserve at Ekone Ranch since 2013, helping to support and advocate for family—and community-led death care. She is a founding member of the Conservation Burial Alliance and helped create the community-led death care resource.

17:50 - Sacred Activism and the Ritual of Artmaking for Emerging Worlds

Featured on this panel:

V (formerly Eve Ensler) is the Tony Award-winning playwright, activist, performer, and author of the Obie award-winning theatrical phenomenon The Vagina Monologues. She is founder of V-Day, and founder of One Billion Rising. She is a co-founder of the City of Joy, a revolutionary center for women survivors of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Isis Indriya: is a facilitator of cultural and social evolution through her visioning, curation and production of ritual theater, ceremonies, and large scale music festivals such as Lightning in a Bottle and Symbiosis Festival with tens of thousands in attendance.

Alixa Garcia: See full bio below.

18:45 - Break 

19:00 - Coaxing the Artist Within: An Imagination Practice- Alixa García.

You can sign up for tickets here.

About this year's curator Alixa García: 

Alixa García is a distinguished artist, award-winning poet and organizer, music producer, published author, and movement strategist. With a rich 23-year background in creative strategies for social and environmental movements, curriculum development, and facilitation, Garcia’s expertise has been instrumental in supporting justice leaders, scholars and students, community activists, state representatives, and the nonprofit sector to realize their potential in the areas of creative blueprinting, trans-local and global organizing, and environmental education. Her unique approach centralizes creativity and the role of imagination as an essential tool for liberation.

Alixa is a sought-after public speaker, visual artist, and facilitator. Her work has been published by Whit Press, AK Press, Monacelli, Hatchett, and Daraja Press. She is an editorial board member of the ERA Coalition & Fund for Women's Equality and the lead curriculum developer and facilitator for the CS Fund Just Transitions 2024 Fellowship Cohort. 

Her latest offering, a Course on the Imaginal: Cultivating the Visionary Self, uses what she calls Creative Somatics and attention-intensive practices to help move trauma and grief through and out of the body so that we may wholly begin to unearth the visionary within.

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This annual Gathering is part of JRF’s Emerging Futures teams work to resource and spotlight people and practices that are seeding and growing new patterns out of very different soils so that we can move towards other possible worlds. 

We continue to hold space for and resource this annual event because we believe -

• If we want to orient and find our way towards different futures then we need to cultivate very different soils from which new seeds can emerge. Those different soils will only be possible if we invest in very different kinds of collective imagination - worldviews, practices and people that lead us to alternative patterns.

• We believe that it’s a practice that many more people can adopt - with invitations to step into spaces for shared dreaming, for collective imagination - we can connect people to, and expand people’s sense of other worlds being possible.

• We want to stay alive to new people and practices that are emerging in the field, as well as discover those that have been doing this work under other guises for a long time.

• We want to platform and learn from different ideas and practices from different places in the world.

• We want to create content from the event - recordings of all the sessions - that can be shared openly and widely, so that many people can be inspired, can learn, can unlearn, can listen.