During October the Big Story tour with AIME was in full flow and I found myself receiving an unexpected email titled "Dear Dr Beck…" an acknowledgment that felt like a nudge from the universe, sitting me firmly into the practice of translating these relations I'm seeing and feeling all around me into systems of meaning. The art is becoming an important element of the work, an anchor, a translator, to help transform abstract and fictitious ideals about Indigenous Knowledges into something tangible and alive.
In August I was invited to join a team of researchers including Professor Hope (a puppet) to work on a paper. It started with receiving a gift from Tyson Yunkaporta and Jack Manning Bancroft. "This for you all to use and adapt as you like, from Jack and I in the labs today." A google doc titled: Unlikely Connections x 5
The email thread this gift came on grew and grew and grew, with little/big contributions, people cc'd in and falling out, ideas being dropped and pick up again, just a glimps into the imporv/ collaborative nature of this work... you kind of learn to let these things guide you and go with the spinning, I actually think its an important indicator that its distrubuted power across the relations we are buildng here too and I miss it now when it's not around... I can't deal with the droning project management style of -then this happens > then this> then this> then this>... I mean come on who designs this? It's calcified and causes me little deaths of my spirit so i dip in and out as balanced as I can.
Ohhh I nearly got lost there!!!
Anyway... Parul Punjabi Jagdish (PJ), Prof Hope and I started to dig into the layers of IMAGI-NATION and how it’s emerging as a vital response to this moment in history. We looked at how we've been building as a relational network, not a social one, and seeing at all the ways it fuses Indigenous kinship protocols with cutting edge systems thinking to inform and govern design, to centre this wisdom for the heath of whole systems.
Then on the road somewhere between ceremonies at Uncle Noel Butler's in Milton and Uncle Bruce Pascoe's in Yumbara the email grew again...
"Steph if there's a mad systems image of the unc5 network or dynamics you can throw in, then let's do it, then you'll be co-author with me, Jack, Parul, and the puppet (Hope, P.) Makes 5"
These images came through first
(they have names and stroies if you click in to the gallery below)
With a few old ones that have been here a while, framing the same system in different ways with different and unlikley knowledge allowed to bloom and feed into the center of design.
As you take a seat and take that time in the understanding phase when/ if this paper is published I would encourage you to think about how you enter the space, do you know what are you looking for over here? Is your ask for knowledge grounded in all of our relations?
This work is not just about fixing and aligning with flawed metric/impact standards that determine value, it’s about reshaping the flows of knowledge, power, violence, imagination and reactivating timeless economies (yes we can create any kind of economies we like and do all the time) grounded in reciprocity and abundance.
While you wait for the publication, there is a gift to dive into below... the abstract that shaped this story... Go love go!!
The Abstract:
IMAGI-NATION is a relational (not social) network of changemakers, designed using Indigenous knowledge processes to optimize collaborative imagination at scale, towards implementing regenerative economies embedded in abundant natural landscapes. The network has been realised through the fusion of Indigenous kinship protocols, optimal team dynamics research, network theories, bio-cultural systems knowledge, borderwork theory and more. Diversity and connection to nature are employed not as slogans, but as tangible force-multipliers for imaginative capacity and change. The problems of scale and network saturation are addressed through Indigenous systems of embassy and governance, alongside insights into expansive human relationships from the work of Robin Dunbar and others. Unlikely connections between allies from both the centre and the margins of global economic systems are structured within the network to maximise the effects of the diversity principle, creating adaptive, anti-fragile economies of care. These are urgently needed at this inflection point of world history. Over the last decade, powerful social imaginaries have proliferated globally through disinformation campaigns harnessing vast networks engaged in collaborative imagination projects driven by the politics of hate. Over the next decade, to turn the tide, IMAGI-NATION is designed to harness the same network power to shift the narrative and create change-making movements driven by the spirit of love.
Thank you for trusting us with a piece of your imagination, love you, miss you Byeeeeeee!!!!
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