Advertise on podcast: From What If to What Next

Imandeep Kaur, or Immy to her friends, is the Director and Co-Founder of Civic Square in Birmingham, their Director of Mission and Strategy. She is, to put it simply, one of the most inspiring people I have ever met, and to me she is one of the great guardians of the collective radical imagination. Together with many people and partners, Civic Square are reimagining land stewardship, finance, governance, and deeply committing to ecological building design, bio-based material retrofit, and enabling a wider built environment transition. Their focus on how we build locally-rooted resilience to climate change by putting people at the forefront of their own social, ecological, economic and climate transition is state of the art, entirely replicable and brilliant. What a delight to spend an hour with Immy. I hope you're going to love it too.

This month's episode is a conversation with producer Jordan Flaherty about the incredible new Afrofuturist film 'Space to Breathe', of which the promotional material states "Space to Breathe is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, framed with a future where there are no prisons or police. The year is 2070 and Sojourner is a young genderqueer filmmaker who sets out to understand how abolition came to be, through history's archives on the movements of the early 21st Century". See more here. It was a joy to meet him and discuss the film in depth, and in this episode, our Producer Bee Addicott has cut our conversation together with short passages from the film. I'd love to know what you think. It's a film that moved me deeply. Why not organise a screening in your neighbourhood? The film was written by Walidah Imarisha, who appeared in Episode 100 of this podcast.

Kate Pickett was co-author of the seminal 'The Spirit Level', and she just published her new book 'The Good Society: and how we make it'. 'The Good Society' is an utterly brilliant and compelling vision of what a more equal future fundamentally rooted in care would look like. I can't recommend it highly enough. It draws on a wide array of empirical evidence to bring alive what such a future would be like. It was a huge honour to sit down with Kate to explore some of the themes in the book and where they overlap with the need to boost and build our radical imagination(s). I hope you love this conversation, do let me know what you think.

The second (Episode 102) of my rejuvenated and back-in-your-life podcast, 'From What If to What Next' features my conversation with the fabulous Solitaire Townsend. Following 2025's New York Climate Week online, the key thing that caught my attention was Solitaire standing up and boldly stating 'F**k Doom'. She told Climate Week "F**k the sad little "last generation" memes. F**k climate being served up as clickbait.  F**k the guilt and grief shoved down our throats.  F**k waiting for the end of the world like it's a season finale".  In my chair many miles away, I whooped in support. I wanted to find out more. Why does it matter so much that we come out fighting for a liveable future rather than resigning to collapse and disaster? It's a wonderful conversation that goes off in so many directions. In it we discuss her 'F*ck Doom' campaign, William Shakespeare, why she's just written a novel, and why climate activism needs to move beyond, in theatrical terms, 'Act One'. It's brilliant and rich.

It's deeply exciting to be able to present your first new episode of 'From What If to What Next' in almost 2 years. As the months have gone past, I've had a sense that there was more still to do, more conversations to be had. From the research I did for 'How to Fall in Love with the Future' and since, I've come across so many amazing people with stories that you read need to hear, with important things to say at this moment in time.   The guest in our first return episode is the person I most wanted in all the 100 previous episodes, the wonderful Rasheedah Phillips, one half of Black Quantum Futurism. Her work is so hugely inspiring, if you haven't come across it already. I will be publishing these now once a month. I'd love to know what you think, your thoughts on this conversation.

And here we are. Episode 100. What a journey! Thank you so much for being a part of it with me. I could not be more delighted by today's guest, who I have wanted on this podcast since its inception. It's the wonderful writer, educator and poet Walidah Imarisha, one of my great she-roes. I really hope you are going to love the conversation that we had. And this episode starts with a couple of BIG announcements which I won't spoil, I'll leave you to dive into them.

On this, our 99th episode of 'From What If to What Next', we have the first episode in which both guests actually joined my physically in the studio! I was joined by Ruth Ben Tovim and Anne-Marie Culhane, both extraordinary practitioners of community arts and what they call 'the Art of Invitation'. I have learned so much from both of these extraordinary women. The question we dive deep into is "What if invitations to participate in civic life were creative and caring?". You are going to love this one. The video Ruth mentions about the 'Town Anywhere' exercise is here. In two weeks time, we hit Episode 100! Don't miss it. We have a VERY special guest, and also a big announcement or two. See you there

You're in for a bit of a treat here. In today's episode things are a little bit different: you usual Producer is your host, you usual host is a guest, we've woven some beautiful sound recordings into our episode to make it a sensory experience for you. Our other guest is Andrew Skeoch, sound recordist and author of the excellent book, Deep Listening to Nature. You can find his Listening Earth catalogue of nature soundscape albums here. This episode was such a joy to be part of, I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it, and I hope that you find yourself listening to the world around you with a deeper intensity.

Today's episode is a beauty. It brings together Dr. Lyla June Johnston, an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages with Nick Romeo, author of 'The Alternative', to explore 'What if there was an alternative to capitalism after all?' They bring such contrasting yet complementary perspectives for a conversation that, at times, takes the breath away. I hope you love this episode. My deepest thanks to them, and to you for your support of this podcast, and Ben Addicott, as always, for his audio pixie dust sprinkling.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Here in the UK, the Right to Roam has been pushed into the news headlines by the activities of Dartmoor landowner Alexander Darwall, who just announced that he is appealing the recent victory for campaigners who overturned the ban on wild camping that he brought in last year. His actions have triggered a beautifully colourful and well-supported campaign, and growing political support. This week we bring together Nadia Shaikh and Lewis Winks, both of whom campaign for a right to roam, to explore what it could actually be like to have a right to roam, how it would impact society, the natural world, and our collective ability to 'see things as if they could be otherwise'. It's a delightful conversation. Do excuse our not-quite-so-perfect-as-usual sound quality, our Producer Ben is away on holiday so we've had to improvise! And, as always, do let us know what you think...   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Better what, I hear you ask? You're in for a treat as I introduce you to futurist and futures designer Monika Bielskyte. She is one of the world's boldest and most adventurous futures thinkers, so you are in for a treat as we dive deep into her concept of 'Protopian' thinking, and so much more. Prepare for a super workout for your imagination!   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Season's greetings to you! Here is your special Christmas day episode, appropriately focusing on the theme of compassion. Our guests are Jared Seide and Dr Ann Seide, whose work on compassion is amazing. To find out more about Centre for Council, click here. You might also enjoy this film about their "Cops & Communities: Circling Up" program, this one about LAPD officers talking about working with "council huddles" and a presentation Jared and Ann did for a cohort of Law Enforcement leaders on compassion training for police officers.  I really hope you love this episode, and thanks so much for your love and support of this podcast during 2023. Have a great festive season.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

As you'll have spotted by now, we're never ones to shy away from asking a good big bold What If question. This week we are diving into the question of how different things would be if we were to rethink the scale on which we operate, and were to root ourselves more closely in nature's own boundaries. The bioregional movement was a big thing in the 1990s and faded away a bit, but is now back with a bang, and we speak to two of its key proponents, Erika Zarate and Daniel Christian Wahl to find out more. How would bioregionalism going mainstream change the world and how we look at it? This is a fascinating deep dive, and I hope you love it. As always, do let me know what you think... thanks!   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

The British Ecological Society's REED Ecological Network (REED standing for Racial and Ethnic Equality and Diversity) was formed due to the very low levels of people of colour represented in the sector, and their feeling that "it's easy to feel alone when working in ecology, the environment and related fields like agriculture".  My two guests this week, Bushra Schuitemaker and Reuben Fakoya-Brooks are both members, and in spite of working in quite different ecological sectors, are active founder members of this network. How did it start? What does it do? And how does it actively fire the imaginations of those involved? This is a beautiful episode, I hope you love it. As always, do let us know what you think.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.

Jonathan Rhodes and Joanna Grover recently wrote a great book called 'The Choice Point' and work together as Imagery Coaching. They work with a wide range of organisations and individuals, building their capacity to be imaginative in a multisensory way. Naturally, their tools and their insights are highly relevant to the themes of this podcast given that, as bell hooks once put it, "what we cannot imagine cannot come into being". I hope you enjoy our conversation and that, at the end of it, your own imagination feels like it has had a good workout too! As always, thanks for listening and do let me know what you think, and thanks to Ben Addicott, Producer Supreme.   Please consider supporting the podcast by visiting www.patreon.com/fromwhatiftowhatnext and becoming a patron.