Rob Hopkins

“It’s about how the first step to slaying a dragon is for one person to say, probably drunk in a bar somewhere, “I bet it can be done, though”.  These are the words of fantasy author Alexandra Rowland, whose novel ‘A Conspiracy of Truths’ was published late last year. The quote captures the essence of an idea, a genre, which she coined, called ‘hopepunk’. Fantasy and sci-fi is a world rich in diff...

Welcome to our last blog of 2018.  I'd like to thank you for joining me on this journey over the year and for your support and enthusiasm. Jackie Andrade is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Plymouth whose work focuses on imagination and how we can imagine different futures for ourselves and use that to help change our behaviour. Jon May is also a Professor in the School of Psychology...

In their book ‘Imagination First’, Eric Liu & Scott Noppe-Brandon wrote “it is pretty clear what makes young humans allergic to imagination: school”.  In my search for schools or approaches to education that truly place the imagination at their heart, and which avoid this kind of allergy, I was fascinated to hear about Den Grøenne Friskole (‘The Green Free School’) in Copenhagen. They are a school...

Ruth Sapsed is the Director of an arts and well-being charity called Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination.  She set it up 15 years ago with the artist Idit Nathan.  It grew out of a group who started meeting because they were concerned about the creative opportunities that education was offering their kids, the group creating a coming together of artists, educators, academics and parents.  Their co...

I recently put out a call looking for places, events or venues that are creating wifi-free spaces, places where people can intentionally get away from smartphones and the distraction they bring into our lives, some time to cultivate the attention.  One of the suggestions I received was a café in Paris called ‘Télescope’.  On a recent visit to the city I headed over to Télescope, a small but rather...

I recently put out a call looking for places, events or venues that are creating wifi-free spaces, places where people can intentionally get away from smartphones and the distraction they bring into our lives, some time to cultivate the attention. One of the suggestions I received was a café in Paris called ‘Télescope’. On a recent visit to the city I headed over to Télescope, a small but rather l...

Amy Seefeldt set up and runs the Centre for Imagination at an international boarding school in the foothills of the Himalayas in India called Woodstock. As I begin exploring what education would look like if it were underpinned by imagination, and if young people emerged from it with their imaginations fully formed, empowered and vibrant, I was keen to hear her experience of creating, in effect, a...

As one of the co-founders of Cooperation Jackson and Executive Director of the non-profit division of Cooperation Jackson, Kali Akuno has spent the past four and a half years, through Cooperation Jackson, working to transform Jackson into ‘a beacon of radical politics’. For the uninitiated, Jackson is the capital city of Mississippi, with a population of around 200,000 people, with its 80% black p...

I was recently in Lille in France as a speaker at an event called the World Forum for a Responsible Economy.  One of my fellow speakers was Judy Wicks, who I've wanted to meet for years. Judy is from Philadelphia in the US, and is a retired entrepreneur, and was one of the founders of BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies.  She now describes herself as an 'activist citizen', acti...

It was such an honour to speak to Dominique Christina.  Her work is remarkable.  Her voice is insistent and fierce and tender and kind and wrathful and beautiful, sometimes all at the same time.  She speaks truth to power in a way that few can. She describes herself as "a performing artist, an author, an educator and an activist". Her words can stir tears or they can stir revolutions. Her words aw...

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 Developm...

Last week I embarked on the 1o hour train journey to Dundee in Scotland to visit a project I had heard about on the radio called Art Angel. We know that stress, trauma, anxiety, loneliness and depression all have an adverse impact on the human imagination, causing it to contract and shrink. We know that people suffering from those things find it far harder to think about the future in positive way...

A question that has arisen in my research around imagination and also in the recent interview I did with Stuart Candy was what would it look like if a local, city or national government were to create a ‘Ministry of Imagination’? If the revitalisation of the imagination were felt to be so important that its protection, enhancement and cultivation needed a bespoke department, one that cross-cut oth...

A question that has arisen in my research around imagination and also in the recent interview I did with Stuart Candy was what would it look like if a local, city or national government were to create a ‘Ministry of Imagination’? If the revitalisation of the imagination were felt to be so important that its protection, enhancement and cultivation needed a bespoke department, one that cross-cut oth...

A question that has arisen in my research around imagination and also in the recent interview I did with Stuart Candy was what would it look like if a local, city or national government were to create a ‘Ministry of Imagination’? If the revitalisation of the imagination were felt to be so important that its protection, enhancement and cultivation needed a bespoke department, one that cross-cut oth...

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 progressiv...

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...

One of the highlights of my summer was collecting my Totnes Passport.  The whole Brexit debacle from inception to its current state of woeful ineptitude and brazen jingoism has been one entirely bereft of imagination.  Neither side has presented any kind of an imaginative story, either as to the wonderful things Brexit might enable, or the wonderful possibilities that remaining in the EU might pre...

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 it...

Listening to Drew Dellinger’s poetry regularly gives me goosebumps. Very shortly it will give you goosebumps too. He is a US-based writer, poet, speaker and teacher whose passions revolve around ecology, social justice, cosmology, social change and transformation. He uses arts activism to build movements, such as ‘Planetise the Movement’ which he founded. He is fascinated by the big stories that o...

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...

Last week, close to my home, was the Transition Design Symposium. It brought together people from around the world interested in what design can bring to the need for an urgent societal Transition, and for 2 days its attendees basked in glorious sunshine and fascinating interactions. I managed to catch up with Michel Bauwens who was attending and speaking at the conference, and we took some time f...

Rima Staines is an artist, musician and illustrator, puppet-maker, stop-frame animator, clock-maker, theatre designer and one half of Hedgespoken with her partner Tom Hirons.  Tom is a writer of poetry and prose and teller of traditional folk tales.  Together they created ‘Hedgespoken’, a travelling off-grid storytelling theatre run from a 1966 Bedford RL lorry, converted to be a home and a go-any...

Close to where I live is a project called Landworks. Landworks describes itself as "an independent charity providing a supported route back into employment and community for those in prison or at risk of going to prison".  I often walk my dog past it, and from the road you can see their polytunnels, a beautiful cob wall with roundwood pole roof, their vegetable beds, and many of the things they ma...

Urinetown by Rob Hopkins