“[L]earning to live-with (transformation) acknowledges that ‘the’ world is not ending, but ‘a’ world is, and that some worlds need to end in order to allow others room to breathe.” Verlie 2022, p. 12
Droughts, floods, biodiversity loss, growing inequality. As the challenges of our times become harder to ignore, so do the emotions tangled up with them. Discomfort, grief, hopelessness, rage. These feelings are not side effects of transformative change, they are part of how we experience it, resist it, and work towards it.
Many of us, especially in institutions built on the promise of progress, have learned to avoid these emotions rather than sit with them. This paper asks what happens when researchers try to do the opposite.
Written by a team of transition scholars who turned their attention inward, the paper explores what it means to ‘live with’ the affective side of transformation, drawing on Blanche Verlie’s work on relating to change as an ongoing, embodied practice rather than a problem to solve. To explore this, the authors developed a cultural probe, a set of open-ended materials and prompts designed to invite reflection rather than deliver answers.
What they found was a paradox. The tools meant to help us stay with discomfort can just as easily become another way of avoiding it. The cultural probe is shared here not as a fixed method, but as something to be questioned, adapted, and even resisted, an invitation to practice the emotional work that transformation asks of us, while staying alert to how deeply we are conditioned to avoid it.
Read the full publication here.
