This month’s Growth Edges contributors

1. Anna Bertmark is a Brighton-based sound designer, design researcher, and PhD candidate in digital media, exploring transformative learning methods that foster ecocentric perspectives.
2. Artemis Bear (The Garden Bristol) has spent the last decade developing an experimental education project in Bristol and is interested in rapid pragmatic culture change through deep deschooling and decolonising practice.
3. Helen Simmons is a design studies researcher (Northumbria University) exploring grassroots participatory infrastructuring that support co-creation of policy and services for social innovation.
4. Holly Doron is the regenerative research steward at CoLab Dudley researching how we might invite regenerative cultures through collective place-based learning, imagining and action that unlocks just and flourishing futures.
5. Jo Orchard-Webb is a geographer (CoLab Dudley and based in Bournemouth) exploring everyday participation in regenerative futures and cultural justice.
6. Julia Costa Carneiro is the research lead at Knowle West Media Centre (Bristol) exploring citizen science in neighbourhoods.
7. Laura Onions is an artist and educator (Eagle Works Studios & Project Space and University of Wolverhampton) with a printmaking practice working with archival materials to connect with place, people and histories, to respond to local ecologies, inherited landscapes and climate justice and reimagine in the present.
8. Lorna Prescott (CoLab Dudley and Dudley CVS) has a background in engineering design and community development, experimenting with social infrastructure and instigating and nurturing CoLab Dudley.
9. Naomi Bennett-Steele is a researcher and facilitator, queer liberation & justice seeker and gardener currently delving into participatory systems mapping with net zero policy makers (University of Birmingham) as well as economic justice and emergent strategy.
10. Rachel Schwartz-Narbonne is an environmental chemist (Sheffield Hallam University) working on a project called Snorkelling in Soil and currently reflecting on transdisciplinarity.

Curiosity cross-pollination

The conversations in Growth Edges emerge from who is in the room and the curiosities they bring. Below are snippets of where our wandering conversations took us.

• Regenerative cultures, design, governance and commoning practices
  • Evolving design question prompt cards that have emerged through Stories of Place learning around co-creating rituals and place stewardship.
  • Flourishing Edges Unconference - The importance of multiplicity and the way it is invited in advance, during, and post-conference.
  • Regenerative governance and its application to social systems and networks and its connection to patterns of governing and commoning, using David Bollier's work.
  • Systems mapping.
  • Growth Edges as social commoning practicem connecting ideas, learning and practices with emotional affirmation in work that can feel isolating.
  • Accessibility of time and resources required to do things ‘differently’ and to contribute to ‘difference’
  • The value of the learning process over the outcome.
  • The resilience of regenerative practices.
• Social entrepreneurs and change makers
  • Community-led data generation and action learning interventions
  • Livable neighbourhoods in Bristol and designing a public engagement strategy based on creating good stories - “Learning the city”
  • Bristol Commons with young activists and discussions about community technology and open source technology.
  • What adults can learn from young people
  • Playfulness and the gift economy and the importance of reciprocal relationships rather than transactional ones.
  • A community cooperative called Dwellbeing, focusing on slow, participatory, and creative community
  • The importance of allowing young people to learn and teach themselves
• AI and environmental and cultural impact
  • The climate impact and environmental footprint of using AI, including water usage for cooling in data centers.
  • The importance of mindfulness in using AI and the value of human creativity and process.
  • The lack of feedback loops in AI and the need for critical engagement with its use.
  • The need for alternative ways of documenting and sharing information.
  • Manifestation of colonical extraction and theft from creative works.
  • Outsourcing reasoning and seeking wisdom from machines rather than humans learning from being in the world.
• Collaborative research networks and reimagining research
  • The challenges in decolonising research practices.
  • Cultural and research space translation
  • The challenges of moving between different learning spaces.
  • Making science more participatory and less extractive, especially with harder-to-reach communities.
  • Structures around art and community-led practices.
  • The messiness of participatory research.
  • Civic universities.
  • Reimagining research as water i.e. flowing to the lowest point, changing form, destructive and life-giving qualities.
  • Creating a collaborative research network to support economic justice work.
  • Collective inquiry on the patterns of commoning and knowledge creation platforms.
  • Alternative infrastructures and networks of research, and the challenges we face.
  • The bureaucratic and funding barriers that prevent grassroots organisations from participating in university-led research.
  • The systemic challenges of academia and the need for creative approaches to funding and collaboration.
  • Hacking the ‘community collaborator’ relationship in research funding applications.

Gifts shared