Cascade Inquiry
Challenge: Co-Create and Facilitate a series of workshops linked to immersive installations. The workshops will bring underrepresented communities together with formal decision makers to co-imagine climate trajectories.
Working pattern:
Part-time over a year, potentially with less and more intense periods during the year; Extensive Travelling within the UK.
Who we’re looking for:
A personable Story Expert with a wealth of experience in facilitating engagement workshops and building trust in diverse communities. The story expert will have experience in producing evaluation strategy and impact reporting. A passion for innovative uses of immersive technology and an interest in climate justice is a plus!
Start date:
Story Associates will join the scheme in early September. They will start by taking part in a Deep Story Training Camp and will then move on to their Host projects and placements.
How:
You might approach this as an exploration of how Story Skills enable multi-perspectival knowledge creation and decision making, how stories work with difference to inspire hope and nurture imagination, or an experiment in using Story Skills to communicate climate futures.
Award:
£37,099, pro rata, point 30 on National Spinal Point, or equivalent value fellowship grant (paid on supplier contract basis).
The scene is set…
The hush in the room is unsettling. Everyone is transfixed, immersed. They take slow, spellbound steps as if pulled through the installation by an invisible force. Their eyes return the fluorescent glow of the many screens surrounding them. A channel has opened up: a passage between past, present and future. A confluence of memories and dreams. This daze is not a suspension of disbelief but a wormhole of critical imagination. Visions are being reconfigured. Expectations are being rearranged. Possibilities are being unearthed. Your role is to catalyse and capture these emerging processes.
Superflux is unlike any company you’ve encountered before. It is a ‘Speculative Design and Experiential Futures Studio’. Their new project, CASCADE INQUIRY, will build immersive experiences within which communities and stakeholders can imagine future worlds where positive climate action has been taken. The immersive experiences they create invite clients, collaborators, communities and wider participants to explore multiple possibilities and navigate precarity and uncertainty with active hope. Welcome to the realm of hypothetical worlds, design fiction, critical foresight and experiential futures.
A hero is summoned…
A new Superflux adventure requires a hero with intellect, experience and imagination. CASCADE INQUIRY is an experiential activation of hopeful futures where positive climate action has been taken. Superflux will invite publics and multiple stakeholders (from policy, corporations and industry) into an immersive world of auspicious climate futures. Connected to these immersive experiences, the hero will work with Superflux to hold a series of pilot workshops around the UK which will bring underrepresented communities together with formal decision makers to co-imagine climate trajectories. The hero’s mission will be to work with Superflux to produce and deliver place-based co-imagination and storytelling workshops, and to help articulate the stories that surface in this imaginative space.
An adventure gets underway…
The hero will need to be prepared to journey around the UK and forge rich relationships with local community groups. Superflux would prefer a Story Associate to work, on average, part-time over one year but to vary their hours in line with more and less intense project periods, sometimes working full-time. Working part-time over a full calendar year they will create, surface, capture and hear complex, nuanced narratives as they take shape. They will untangle the personal stories, self concepts, social relationships, hopes and fears within participants’ perceptions of the more-than-human world. They will sit with difference and conflict to hold a space where polarised groups can recognise their common humanity and produce an on-the-ground community story world.
This hero is a seasoned expert in community engagement and public workshop facilitation. With skills in storytelling they will also have a tested aptitude for qualitative research, impact reporting and evaluation strategy. At the end of the placement they will have shared their gift for imagination with a wide community of diverse individuals. Hope will grow that we can navigate the climate crisis, and work to build positive futures together.
This adventure will contribute to the StoryArcs mission to explore the value and uses of Story Skills in life, learning and work. The findings brought back to StoryArcs HQ will be crucial in our development and co-creation of a Story Skill Set.
This is one of eleven projects. You can find out more about the Story Associate opportunity and explore all eleven opportunities.
Application Portal is now closed.
If you were unable to submit your application due to technical difficulties, personal reasons or other factors please contact us at story@bathspa.ac.uk.
