A co-created gathering rehearsing learning processes that bring us closer to flourishing futures
Collage by Zohreh Baghban with Melanie Woodhead’s photography
Welcome to Flourishing* Edges a space of co-creation where the experimental meets curiosity, and complexity joins uncertainty. In this unconference, we gather from kaleidoscopic backgrounds to rehearse learning together for flourishing futures.
*Flourishing is a shorthand at the moment and we want to explore this together as part of the unconference.
This emerged from…
This unconference emerged from an informal UK-wide group initiated in 2023 by CoLab Dudley. The Flourishing Edges Ecosystem (group / network / community) meet every two months to hold a supportive space for transdisciplinary exploration and discovery.
The Flourishing Edges Ecosystem exists so that we can ask: What if we cross-pollinated about our many different knowledges to see what grows from these seeds of thoughts and connections?
The Flourishing Edges Unconference grew from a place of valuing and wanting to create space for imagining and acting collectively with multiplicity.
This is for you if…
… you are exploring and want to co-evolve learning processes that bring us closer to regenerative futures, in which all life flourishes. For example through but by no means limited to transdisciplinary, creative, decolonising, more-than-human methodologies and practices.
… you feel uncomfortable in traditional formal knowledge conference spaces shaped by fixed linear structures and power asymmetries that centre institutional outputs, productivity and impact.
… you feel frustrated by the business-as-usual world speeding towards ever greater dysfunction and yearn for spaces and networks that are rehearsing the futures we want.
… you would love to become one of 40 co-creators of this flexible gathering:
to sit with complexity and uncertainty
to be in relation with Nature
to embrace multiple ways of knowing
to imagine and act collectively
… you can commit to joining an online co-creating session 17 March 2025 and the unconference 15-17 April 2025 at the Ruskin Mill Glass Centre in Stourbridge.
Your Flourishing Edges journey
Inviting curiosities
18 Nov 2024 - 31 Jan 2025
Rather than abstracts, we invite you to share your curiosities (ideas, provocations, questions, doubts, objects) and how they relate to learning processes that bring us closer to flourishing futures. It might also be helpful to consider the unconference core intentions which will evolve as co-creators join:
to stay with uncertainty and creativity outside of conventional approaches
to share emerging ideas, experiments and how they materialise in practice
to explore care and responsibility around these processes
for reciprocity, self-organisation, experimenting with different ways of participating
for bringing multiple disciplines, research and everyday learning through doing together
to create a social process of coming into relationship with each other and our more-than-human kin and nurturing for our learning networks
We invite you to share your curiosities in your preferred format (text, voice note, object, image, collage, creative output) by 2pm 31 January 2025. Here is a suggested structure for what to include with some examples, but it is completely up to you how you share your curiosities:
I’m curious about… learning with the more-than-human / inviting care in business-as-usual spaces / creating space for uncertainty (you can include several curiosities if you like)
I’d like to engage with others around this through… sharing my work / walking and talking / making together
I can offer… hosting a collaging activity / co-convening conversations / creatively documenting discussions and activities / bringing my lived experience of…
I think this might bring us closer to flourishing futures because…
We want to encourage co-creators from a range of spaces, backgrounds and organisations (academic and non-academic). This is a meeting of peers bringing care and collective attention to how we can rehearse learning processes that bring us closer to flourishing futures. As a small gathering and unconference, we have been intentional in not issuing a blanket call. We have been reaching out intentionally to people across our networks and ecosystems who wouldn’t normally go to conferences or feel comfortable there. Central to the co-design and co-creation of the unconference is creating a truly welcoming and safe space that enables abundant and emergent conditions for this collective exploration.
Attendance is free, funded by Midlands4Cities. All meals will be provided. We have a limited accessibility budget of £52 per person, which can be used for accommodation, travel or care responsibilities. Any of the budget not used will be added to a solidarity fund to support co-creators with additional costs.
Announcing companions and co-creators
21 Feb 2025
We will get in touch to let you know whether you have been accepted as an unconference co-creator. There will also be a waiting list as there are only 40 places available. We will be creating a companion space for everyone who is involved in applying, organising and co-creating the Flourishing Edges Unconference, so everyone’s contribution throughout the whole process, whether you attend the event or not, will be honoured and invite future connections and collaborations. This will be a digital space where people can find out about each other’s curiosities, make connections and explore the processes and co-creations that emerge from the unconference.
Co-evolving the unconference
17 Mar 2025
Our co-convening processes include gathering everyone online a month before the unconference on 17 March 2025 to agree ways to collectively hold space for co-creation and co-convening throughout the two days of the unconference. Different roles and ways of contributing will emerge. Following the collaborative act of the unconference, we will nurture future digital and in-person convening possibilities including joining the Flourishing Edges Ecosystem.
The online pre-unconference convening will create space to:
Get to know one another
Agree unconference community agreements
Explore potential outcomes - material, imaginary, emotional, spiritual, knowledges and many more besides
Nurture a safe space for uncertainty
Reveal overlapping curiosities
Nurture conditions for collaborations to emerge
Establish it is ok to be present in different ways (including quiet spaces, or drawing or making while participating)
The unconference
15 - 17 Apr 2025
During the unconference, we will have an opening session around self-organising practice. Throughout there will be a mix of structured and unstructured activities with moments to come together as a whole to invite many ways of being and energy levels, such as:
Group activities
Paired activities
Walking and talking
Coffee and conversation
Making alongside e.g. participatory thematic collaging
Seed swaps / writing exchanges
Eating together
Each activity will be informed by the co-creators’ submitted curiosities. We will also invite co-creators to creatively document their activities to share learning and inspiration between different groups. This will contribute to the co-creation of a gift, which will be shared in knowledge commons, accessible to all, to open the door to ongoing collaborations. For example, the gift might include practices, tips, tools, languages, embodiment that invites blurring and flourishing of edges between different knowledges. We hope that this nurtures the capacity to move / embrace / borrow / know better how to connect with / be inspired by different ways of being and knowing.
Beyond the unconference
After the unconference, we will share the co-created gift in the online Flourishing Edges companion space, along with processes and learnings. This space to connect will continue to be stewarded by the Flourishing Edges Ecosystem.
If you find all this very interesting, but can’t make the dates for the unconference, you are welcome to join the Flourishing Edges Ecosystem.