Chris Riedy – Finding Transformative Narratives, Exploring Our Common Ground

Humanity is faced with a transformative challenge; we must find new ways of living within planetary boundaries while ensuring that all have access to basic human rights. In meeting this challenge, we need new transformative narratives to help us clearly see the challenges we face and the dangers that lie ahead, capture visions of the future we want, share successful strategies, show individuals how they can play a part in the collective transformation, and build motivation to act.

The focus of my workshop is on transformative narratives that can help us collectively make progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Achieving these goals would have huge positive impacts on health and well-being for people around the world. For the participants, having a sense of a shared positive narrative is likely to contribute positively to their personal sense of well-being.

This workshop will take a diverse group of participants through a process of discovering and documenting the narrative of a sustainable future that they hold dear, and then finding common ground with other participants. The session ties in with the ongoing work of the Meta-Narrative Working Group of the SDG Transformations Forum (https://www.transformationsforum.net/). This group is working to build the systems that can transform narratives, through analysing narratives, connecting those who are working on narrative and experimenting with narrative interventions.

About Chris Riedy:

Chris Riedy is Professor of Sustainability Governance and Director of Higher Degree Research at the Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney. He is a transdisciplinary academic with a research interest in governance and social change for sustainable futures. Chris draws on sociological and political theory, narrative theory, futures thinking and transformative science to design, facilitate and evaluate practical experiments in transformative change towards sustainable futures. Chris is Lead Steward of the Meta-Narrative Working Group under the SDG Transformation Forum, an organisation working to develop systems to support transformation towards the Sustainable Development Goals. He has led more than 80 research projects including current work on megatrends and scenarios for the City of Sydney’s Sustainable Sydney 2050 initiative and pioneering research on collaborative housing as an option for older Australians. He has published two books, more than 40 peer-reviewed articles or chapters, more than 60 research reports and hundreds of web articles.

| May 12th, 2019 | Posted in Uncategorized |

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