At the age of a failing economic system and undeniable evidence of the effects humankind has had over the planet, it is necessary to look for alternatives to the way we live locally. This article explores the use of designing narratives and metanarratives to co-create imaginaries serving as the needed alternatives. This research starts by considering the historical factors to understand how industrialisation and the loss of traditional practices created a culture of disconnection from Nature in the Girona area, but also looks at why people start now reconnecting with it. The analysis is the foundation for speculative design practices to co-create a new local narrative of connection and regeneration. The project adopted the Integrative Worldviews Framework and used paradoxes to create possible future worldviews based on historical factors and literature. Citizens participated in conversational future-visioning workshops to develop and evaluate their local imagery of the previously created worldviews. This conversation-based exercise evidenced the potential of paradoxes in destructive futures to create imaginaries of regeneration. These imaginaries merge and form future stories. From the future narratives, the practice created cultural artefacts embodying a new culture of connection based on storytelling, traditional jobs, and a mythological understanding of Nature. Finally, as observed at the end of the project, these artefacts allow citizens to adopt them as their culture and expand their current worldview.
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This report investigates prior experiences and impacts of the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) with the aim of informing preparation plans for Leeuwarden and Fryslân to organize the event in 2018. The longterm benefits that the ECoC tend to be both tangible through improvements in facilities, and intangible as self-confidence and pride increase as the result of celebrating the destination, its culture and history.
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This article provides a description of the emergence of the Spanish ‘Occupy’ movement, Democracia real ya. The aim is to analyse the innovative discursive features of this movement and to connect this analysis to what we consider the innovative potential of the critical sciences. The movement is the result of a spontaneous uprising that appeared on the main squares of Madrid and Barcelona on 15 May 2011 and then spread to other Spanish cities. This date gave it its name: 15M. While the struggle for democracy in Spain is certainly not new, the 15M group shows a series of innovative features. These include the emphasis on peaceful struggle and the imaginary of a new democracy or worldview, transmitted through innovative placards and slogans designed by Spanish citizens. We consider these innovative not only due to their creativity, but also because of their use as a form of civil action. Our argument is that these placards both functioned as a sign of protest and, in combination with the demonstrations and the general dynamics of 15M, helped to reframe the population’s understanding of the crisis and rearticulate the identity of the citizens from victims to agents. In order to analyse the multimodal character of this struggle, we developed an interdisciplinary methodology, which combines socio-cognitive approaches that consider ideological proposals as socio-cognitive constructs (i.e. the notion of narrative or cognitive frame), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the analysis of discourses related to processes of social imagination and transformation. The socio-constructivist perspective is used to consider these discourses in relation to their actors, particular contexts and actions. The use of CDA, which included a careful rhetoric analysis, helped to analyse the process of deconstruction, transformation and reconstruction that 15M uses to maintain its struggle. The narrative analysis and the discursive theoretical concept of articulation helped to methodologically show aspects of the process of change alluded to above. This change was both in terms of cognition and in the modification of identity that turned a large part of the Spanish population from victims to indignados and to the neologism indignadanos, which is a composition of indignado and ciudadano (citizen).
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phōnē – Giving Minority Languages a Voice is a project application to safeguards and promotes cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. We will connect people who belong to a language minority in their countries with European values across language and cultural borders. 10 institutions will cooperate for the first time, breaking new ground for the RML theatre sector and improving their standing nationallyand internationally. phōnē will be the first ever major international collaboration between theatres working for minority languages.“Languages are vehicles of our cultures, collective memory and values. They are an essential component of our identities, and a building block of our diversity and living heritage.”The loss of a language means not only the loss of a basic element of communication, but also of a complete system of knowledge developed over time. The disappearance of a language also means the loss of a unique, unrecoverable universe associated with a particular environment. It means the loss of diversity.Phōnē wants to make an active contribution to the vitalisation of endangered minority languages. In order to keep endangered languages alive, theatre is one of the most suitable media because it provides a space for language, but also because it uses non-language-based forms of communication. In this way, theatre in particular makes it easier for people who do not yet have a confident knowledge of theminority language to get started. This will safeguard cultural and linguistic diversity in Europe. Strengthening the cultures and their languages will also strengthen the economic basis of the theatres working in these minority languages.phōnē is aiming for three main objectives to strengthen theatre in its role of vitalising endangered minority languages.A – Giving Minority Languages a voiceTogether we will search for narratives that tell about the people in their minority language region. Thestories are about and from people who live and work in remote regions of Europe and are written anddeveloped in the respective minority language.B – Giving Minority Languages a European stageThe developed texts need a stage to reach the widest possible audience. As different as the expectednarratives will be, so different will be the stages (outreach / site-specific / digital) on which they are presented.Different formats support the goal of addressing the broadest possible audience in the communitiesand involving them both passively and actively in the use of their minority language.
