5.10: Outside Conversations with Tuesday Ryan-Hart + Dr. Gabrielle Donnelly - We wrote a book chapter!

Show Notes

  • Tim: We have a particularly delicious and delectable pod for you today: (1) because of the content; and (2) because of the constellation of human-beings you are going to get to listen to. First of all, before we even go into the guests, who are pretty remarkable, I actually have a guest show host with me today - the remarkable and incorrigible, Sommer Sibilly Brown. Sommer is an Outsider; she’s one of our crew. She's also the Executive Director of the Virgin Islands Good Food Network, she's on the advisory board of the National Farm to School Network, and she’s also a radio DJ… and in my own estimation a highly regarded fashionista!!

  • Tim: Today, we have Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Gabrielle Donnelly on the podcast with us today. Gabrielle is an Outsider, a professor at Acadia University, a good friend, a hosting and facilitation practitioner well into her mastery, as well as an all-round viewer of life from an incredibly unique perspective. I feel like every time I talk with you, Gabe, you're bringing a way of seeing something which is from a vantage point that I just haven't seen it from which is probably what makes you such an incredible researcher in so many ways but just as a friend and a colleague. It's one of the real gifts I think that you bring again and again to everything we do.

  • Gabrielle: The book really came from this idea that what we were noticing in a lot of conversations around futures, and the future, is that people have a hard time imagining it. Because there is so much that we're confronted with that feels hard and surmountable and  challenging. My co-editor (Alfonso Montori) and I, really saw the need to activate and think about what does creativity in the way we look at the future. How can we activate that? How can we invite that imagination around these potential futures that we're moving towards, beyond dystopias and utopias? We have amazing chapters from adrienne marie brown and Autumn Brown. We have Báyò Akómoláfé, we have Ziauddin Sardar talking about decolonizing the imagination, we have people talking about universal, basic income and what would an ecological civilization look like and so there's this kind of very broad and wide set of invitations to thinking about futures in generative and inspiring ways.

  • Tuesday: I feel really proud of our chapter, “Taking a Radical Stance for Complex Joy in the Work of Shaping Change.” We are taking a stand for complex joy for the future. That, is for me, what is underneath the chapter - us taking a stand for doing this work toward the future in a way that brings joy, that believes in wholeness and goodness. It's rooted in what we're doing now. We're not just hoping for that future; we’re actually experiencing it now and we know that taking a joyful stance - complex joy - not just kind of what people might think of when they hear joy. It felt like underneath this chapter was a desire, for me at least, to articulate that we can move toward a future in a way that has more connection, more joy, more depth… it is not easy but also it isn't something that is just an imagination. It is actually what's happening.

  • Gabrielle: When we talk about “joy,” we're talking about it in the context of work that has an allegiance towards equitable futures. Complex joy was actually the heart of this chapter that we discovered as we wrote it together and it was because we were in conversations around what is this quality - not that we're enforcing on people in rooms - but that we want to create the space for the potential to experience joy even in challenge and hardship. What we're talking about with complex joy is actually that we can create the opportunities to experience that even in hardship and I think there's a line that Tuesday wrote which I think captures this really beautifully and it says, “we can choose a joyful path, one full of moments of challenge, struggle and triumph or we can choose a painful path with those same moments of challenge, struggle and triumph.” This kind of joy is not enforced on anyone. It's not expected but we're creating the conditions for the potential to experience it if people want to.

  • Tuesday: For me, one of the biggest discoveries was actually the experience of complex joy while writing this chapter. I experience writing sometimes as excruciating; like an excruciating intent to try to get my ideas onto a page and yet locking arms with Gabe and then turning it around to feel inspired. So, even writing the chapter had a bit of arduousness to it and yet it was in the turning to each other, in finding Gabe as my writing partner. In this chapter we became writing partners in a way that I think might have been the intent but I don't think was in any way a foregone conclusion. I think actually finding our writing partnership was something that was found through complex joy.  It's something we imagine into the future. I had the experience of complex joy as I was writing about complex joy. 

  • Gabrielle: It certainly forged a depth of relationship because of that vulnerability of exchange that happened between us. This is one of the best collaborative writing experiences I've had because we slowed it down - we collaboratively came up with an arc and then each of us would go away and write that section almost fully - we kind of exchanged them and integrated them and so in each section the lines are really woven to the point where it's hard to see what is Tuesday and what is me and that, I can say in my experience, is incredibly rare in a co-writing partnership… so for me, it was one of the most meaningful, nourishing, co-writing experiences I've had.

  • Sommer: I don't know if you just coined another term, Tuesday and Gabe, that will result in another chapter… but when you said, “the vulnerability of exchange” I immediately thought about the way we have to co-create anything. As a food system advocate, I'm rebuilding food systems or working to create new futures for food systems - what is my vulnerability of of exchange with my community partners, with farmers, with governments, with consultants that allow us to create an arc that you just highlighted? We do our work and then we share that work wholeheartedly and openly with another person in the community and say here take it apart, add to it, give it back to me, I trust you with the future that I'm imagining and that when you pass it back to me, you will give me feedback that might be difficult, might be beautiful, might be wonderful, but I'm going to stick in it with you because I see you as my partner. I don't know if “vulnerability of exchange” exists as a scholarly term but when you said it I was like, I need to be in that. I need to co-create my relationships and my systems change work in my community with that intention - find the right people and the right ways to hold space, to have the “vulnerability of exchange” happen because then we'll make something new that is reflective of me and them and so I just wanted to elevate that in this moment.

  • Gabrielle: The larger context of the book of Creative Futures is thinking beyond the worldview of modernity in its limitations and in terms of some of the binaries that exist  - mind-body, action-reflection, personal-social, results-relationships - all of these things are seen in opposition and one side is often highly valued in a modern worldview over the other and we're actually saying let's bring these into balance, into relationship, into conversation because we're going to need it all to move forward.

  • Tuesday: Joy isn't in the solving. It's in the striving. It’s not actually in the landing at a solution. It’s in the striving with each other toward this future we want. There is something that we're saying about ‘no finish line’ (solution) that we're saying is not where the joy lies but rather there is a joy that is to be found in moving toward it together that I think is our birthright. I think we can look back to our ancestors and find the places that they were able to be joyful and striving and moving toward a future together. I hope that our descendants can… but it's not because they're actually going to get to a finish line. There is something innate in being a human being when we turn toward each other, to move toward a future together, I think there is some joy that is just inherent in that no matter how hard it is.

    Resources:

The Outsideshared work, participatory leadership, systems change