I'm Back

 I feel like I have been away for ages. Aberdeen was great and felt like an old school residential.  It was interesting because it proved again that we need to go away to be together, there actually isn't really a shortcut.  Even the terrible food in the hotel became part of things, gave us something to bond together other.  The story of sneaking out for Dutch chips and eaten them by the dock is as important as anything we actually said in the stuffy meeting room.

I am always happy when I understand what a project is for and I think we are getting closer to understanding what voices of the futures is for.  Perhaps we should start to try and do the paragraph in the lift the Steve Jobs summing up as my brother would say.  Its one of the things we seem to be terrible at in universities especially the humanities.

Here goes from what I know :-

'Voices of the futures is a project about education and learning. It focuses on listening to young peoples voices ideas, worries and dreams in relation to our future and the future of the planet.  The central aim is to work across disciplinary boundaries to re-imagine how we understand the world around us and our impact as individuals, communities and species.  We believe that change is possible and acknowledge the difficulties we face, however our vision is underpinned by a collective radical hope for a future that is not yet written. '

It was just a start but may be its something we could work on as a team. 

Practically I still struggle to find a place which is actually my place.  I think I am or have been a deep ecologist and planet first by history and nature and my radical hope or my excuse for living a life that is nt full of guilt.  My hope is for the planet and not the species - 'We have had our shot and look at where we've got'.

I do keep changing my mind about things and to go back to arts methods or arts practice I suppose that I'm waiting for a muse - a secret plan or an idea that fits in.  I'm not worried about my contract as I'm well over in terms of days as I keep attending things and doping extra work but this work is on the edges of the residency not in the middle space.  Edges and middle.

The thing i keep thinking about is scale and time - we seem to operate on a really small scale - a single tree a Wee Forest how much carbon does an electric tooth brush use?  and then there is always the reply or the feeling that individual actions don't make much difference.   Then we have control and civil disobedience the way Men in old style hats and coats hate yet manage extinction rebellion and Greta and how education turns everything even revolution into a heuristic.  So in my melting pot I have time, scale and resistence.  I also think my job is to try and help people out of their grooves so they can pop up and have a different conversation - that you me and Johans job and i think we do this very well. 

Back to PhD now I think.