FUTURES Thoughts with Geoffrey Mulgan

Geoffrey Mulgan is professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London, UK and keynote address at Malmö Möts. The talk will be curated by Marika Hedemyr and focus on his work pertaining to art, radical imagination and hope as capacities for reimagining democracy.

In this talk, Mulgan will address the role of the arts in social imagination and shaping the future. How much is their role to warn, to testify, to spot emergent patterns or to make the present feel unnatural?  And how well placed are they now to do more detailed design, future visions and pathways? He'll look at the role of radical imagination, utopias and distopias, and why more prescriptive literature, film or art sometimes feels banal. He will argue that the idea of the arts as trailblazers or legislators is sometimes misunderstood. They contribute best at a tangent rather than head on, encouraging hope by showing the plasticity of the world, and contributing to explorations of possible futures and pathways more than precise blueprints.

Read more about Geoff Mulgan and

Malmö Research Center for Imagining and Co-Creating Futures.

This program is part of Democracy Week Malmö connects, held from 12–18th June. The event is free of charge and open to the public. The full program is available here: www.malmo.se/malmomots