A new Audacity of Imagination: Envisioning Sustainable Inclusion – Transforming toward new Patterns – Practicing Heterotopic Organizing

Abstract

Starting from the re-imagination of sustainable futures, the paper asks how we can transform collaboration practices into new and inclusive patterns to shape the future. This paper focuses on discourse agents who have reimagined how to live together, conduct business, and shape politics in societies from an organizational-education and discourse-analytical perspectives. Their ideas and rationalities can be traced back to the educational philosopher John Dewey. Today, social movement organizations such as the German-speaking economic democratic network Economic Change (Netzwerk Oekonomischer Wandel (NOW) seek new ways to achieve the "great transformation." By designing, testing, and disseminating alternative future patterns of social coexistence, the network must learn how to make different positions and strategies productive. Using the pattern language of commoning, it employs a set of tools that can help to anchor new practices of "heterotopic organizing" in everyday life. Ausgehend vom Neu-Imaginieren nachhaltiger Zukünfte fragt der Beitrag danach, wie wir unsere Praxis der Zusammenarbeit zu neuen und inklusiven Mustern der Zukunftsgestaltung transformieren können. Aus organisationspädagogisch-diskursanalytischer Perspektive finden wir Diskursakteure, die das Zusammenleben, das Wirtschaften und das politische Gestalten in unseren Gesellschaften neu denken schon bei dem Bildungsphilosophen Dewey. Heute sind es Soziale Bewegungs-(organisationen) wie das wirtschaftsdemokratische Netzwerk Ökonomischer Wandel (NOW), das nach neuen Wegen hin zur ‚großen Transformation' sucht. Indem es alternative Zukunftsmuster des gesellschaftlichen Zusammenlebens entwirft, erprobt und verbreitet, muss es zugleich lernen, differente Positionen und Strategien produktiv zu machen.

Awareness-Based Systems Change

“…Woods et al, 2020), the past years have seen a spatial shift in leadership for global causes to countries of the Global south (Pereira et al, 2020) and the recuperation of sources of neglected and silenced wisdom, creativity, and innovation. De Sousa Santos (2020) describes as "heterotopian imaginaries" (Weber, 2022) the post-abyssal democracies, which overcome the (abyssal) lines that have separated the "dominant" and the "marginalized" social groups and their knowledge systems and move towards ways of democratizing, decolonizing, decommodifying, and depatriarchalizing social relations and practices. Another way to think about this is that we aim to make visible place-based knowledge-inaction that already exists, but that has been discounted through hegemonic structures that organize and disseminate knowledge hierarchically.…”