Reclaiming the power to imagine the futures we want to see, rooting movement strategy in vision and values
“Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizon of the thinkable,” wrote the cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Fifteen years on, that bit of truth still hurts. Many of us can describe, in painful detail, what is wrong with the world we live in. But when asked to picture what should replace it, we often find our imaginations stuck, closed down by grief, cynicism or plain exhaustion. This is not a personal failing. It is one of the great, quiet victories of the systems we are struggling against: the weakening of our belief that another world is genuinely possible.
This course exists to help repair that capacity. It offers space, practices and frameworks for reclaiming radical imagination as a strategic resource, not a luxury or an afterthought to “the real work” of resistance, but the very ground on which coherent, long-term movement strategy is built.
Activists are often clear about what they are fighting against. We are far less often given the space, or the confidence, to articulate a positive vision of what should come after. Energies get drawn into firefighting and short-term defensive action; as necessary as that work often is, on its own it leaves us unable to build the shared narratives and long-term cooperation we need to change unjust systems at their root. Without enough of a sense of direction, our actions stop adding up over time, and it becomes harder to know which battles are worth fighting, and which we might need to let go.
Vision helps to restore that sense of direction. Together with clarity about our values, it forms the starting point of any coherent strategy: naming where we want to go, and how we intend to travel together. But vision is not a fixed destination or a technical “mission statement” borrowed from corporate strategy. It works best as a compass rather than a blueprint, offering a sense of direction flexible enough to adapt as circumstances, and our own understanding, change and grow.
Visioning work of this kind is not simply a cognitive exercise. For many of us, encountering hopelessness and despair is part of what happens when we try to imagine a better future under the weight of ecological crisis and entrenched injustice. This course treats that difficulty as information rather than an obstacle to route around. Suppressing grief cuts us off from the same emotional depths that hold our passion and our care. Visioning that is emotionally literate, that makes room for difficult feelings rather than overriding them, generally empowers rather than denies our responses to the conditions we are working to change. As Arundhati Roy put it, “another world is not only possible, she is on her way… on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.” Learning to listen for her breathing, together, is much of what this course is about.
We will also explore how radical imagination is strengthened not only by dreaming, but by acting: by experiencing our values embodied in the alternative ways we organise, relate and make decisions together, here and now. Prefigurative practice, living something of the future in the present, is not a distraction from strategy but a strategic act in its own right, sustaining our motivation through the inevitable setbacks ahead and helping to grow the kinds of people and relationships capable of inhabiting the futures we want to build.
Finally, we will widen the lens. Movements need visions broad and diverse enough to hold real difference, while remaining clear enough to sustain a shared sense of purpose, in the spirit of the Zapatista call for “a world in which many worlds fit”. We will practise expanded and intergenerational approaches to visioning that draw in a wider range of voices, including those of future generations and the more-than-human world, and that use contemplative, creative and embodied methods alongside more familiar rational and analytical ones.
Through participating in this course, you will learn how to:
This course is practical, immersive and participatory. It offers direct experience of a range of visioning methods and facilitation approaches, including guided contemplative practice, movement and creative exercises, and collective visioning tools, alongside space to reflect individually and together on what surfaces at a personal and group level. This holistic approach complements elements of hard-nosed political and strategic thinking and analysis. The radical imagination needs to also map on to socio-economic systems and transformative strategies. If you have any questions about this feel free to reach out to us at events@ulexproject.org.
Who is it aimed at?
Anyone with experience in socially engaged action addressing ecological, political and social justice issues. We embrace a broad definition of activism that includes any form of contribution to change and social and ecological justice. That might include: Resistance – action preventing further damage to ecosystems and social justice; Renewal – action focused on developing and creating alternatives for healthier societies and communities; and Building Resilience – action supporting increased resilience in communities to weather the uncertain times ahead.
The main spoken language on the course will be English.
For accessibility and venue information see here.
In the solidarity economy:
(See details of our approach to radical economics here)
Contact us
to apply
Location:
Jana is a facilitator, activist and organiser dedicated to creating transformative learning spaces and building capacity to collaboratively strategise for system change. With a background in education, she has a passion for critical and experiential pedagogy and research interest in how social movements learn and engage in counter-hegemonic knowledge production. Organising in different networks across the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, the UK, and Germany, she is an adventurer of coalition building and practioner of transnational activism. Drawing from experience in the social and climate justice movement, she recently coordinated the programme for People’s Summit with the COP26Coalition and now works with European Alternatives and the School of Transnational Organizing. Keeping it up with the grassroots; Berlin based.
Location:
G has been involved in social movement organising and education since the late 1980’s. He is a highly regarded trainer and has designed numerous training programmes covering areas such as psychosocial resilience in activism, the ecology of social movements, and leaderful organising. As a founding member of the Ulex Project, he is known for highly innovative work blending pedagogical methodologies. This holistic approach to activist learning has inspired numerous training initiatives across Europe. He currently steers the strategic development of the Ulex Project and its social movement capacity building programme.
Location:
Isa (she/her) is an educator, facilitator, and author. She grew up in France before setting off on an adventure to London, where she worked as a freelance journalist, French teacher, and administrator for a community arts organisation, all while writing her PhD on the concept of community. She became Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London (UK), where she taught for 10 years before leaving academia to breathe the air of freedom and collective action. She co-founded and co-facilitates, with Jay Jordan, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which has been bringing together artists and activists since 2004 to co-design and implement creative forms of direct action that are as joyful as they are politically effective. Active in social movements for over 20 years, she has facilitated assemblies of several hundred people, co-organised international mobilisations and climate camps, and trained thousands of people in reinventing forms of civil disobedience. Her passion is exploring collective dynamics and all the ways in which these can be made more fruitful, joyful, and caring, particularly through popular education and rituals. She has been involved with the zad in Notre Dame des Landes since 2016.
Location:
An Maeyens (she/her) is a facilitator and trainer with over two decades of experience in grassroots movements. She specialises in creative, inclusive agenda design and brings deep expertise on group culture, power dynamics, and transformative learning. Starting of in the anti-globalisation movement she has trained thousands in civil disobedience, supported international coalitions, and developed multilingual training programmes and toolkits. Her work spans movements, cultures, and countries, guided by a commitment to care, accessibility, and leaderful organising.
Location:
Ari’s activism began in 2002, at age 16, as a Bosnian refugee in Canada, where they founded and coordinated a group for LGBTIQ high school students and allies. They were a co-founder and leader at kolekTIRV in Croatia and Trans Network Balkan, involved in community organizing, advocacy, program management, team coordination, capacity building, education, media work, campaigns, events, fundraising, etc. In 2024, they joined the Supervisory Board of the Croatian Trade Union Collective of United Precarious Workers and Activists (SKUPA).
Beyond the Balkan region, Ari served as a Board member at Transgender Europe (TGEU), where they held roles as Secretary, Treasurer, and later Co-chair. They have also been a trainer with the Center for Artistic Activism and served on the Advisory Committee and since 2022 as a Community Care Facilitator at FRIDA — The Young Feminist Fund. Since 2024 they are the Operations Manager at Global Philanthropy Project.
Location:
Sergio (all pronouns) was born in Romania and migrated to Germany in the early 2010s. In the past, he was a social worker with homeless people and a social consultant for Eastern European migrants for various organisations. Trained as a filmmaker, he spent two years making a documentary about the ‘civic reawakening’ in Romania and the waves of protest it brought with it. In connection to this, Sergio is currently co-steering the development of an online open-source participative knowledge production platform on activism in Romania. Over the past nine years, Sergiu has offered his skills to various journalists, grassroots collectives and campaigns, mostly working within the labour rights, climate justice, international solidarity and anti-authoritarian movements in Germany and Romania. Nonetheless, his biggest focus since 2020 has been his work as an organiser with the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers Union, where he focuses mostly on organising Romanian migrant workers on construction sites, in factories and in the agricultural field.
Location:
Linzy Na Nakorn is a movement director, politicised somatics practitioner, community organiser and facilitator. For the past decade she has been facilitating movement, body work and creating theatre, dance and participatory performance that advocates for and organises with communities in pursuit of housing, disability and racial justice. Her movement practice focuses on trauma-informed approaches to building resilience, capacity and joy via way of the body for personal, interpersonal and community sustainability. Linzy was a Co-Director of The Big Ride for Palestine in partnership with The Gaza Sunbirds, Native Woman Ride and Middle East Children’s Alliance; using cycling as a tool for mobilising active solidarity and in support of campaigning for the rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. Linzy is part of a UK network of activists and artists advocating for Radical Care – supporting organisations, researchers and institutions to work towards system change in societal approaches to labour, leadership and access.
Location:
Jeroen (he/him pronouns) has been involved in grassroots social movements for more than two decades now, starting back when he was fifteen. Throughout the years the fights for “climate justice” and “migrant justice” have been consistently on top of the list of struggles that make his heart beat faster. A key transformative moment for Jeroen was reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy gave him a language to support the creation of emancipatory learning environments, rooted in a desire for collective liberation. Jeroen has also been exploring in depth Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects among other methodologies to build his trainer’s toolkit. Inspired by the liberatory possibilities of these traditions, he started an organization with a friend, LABO vzw, based in Belgium, where he has worked as a trainer and campaigner between 2013 and 2023.
Ulex: Latin (argelaga Catalan, gorse English) noun:
1. A thorny-evergreen flowering shrub, with a high capacity for regeneration and resilience. Its seedpods open in contact with fire and it reshoots from charred stumps. A successionary plant that grows well under challenging conditions. It improves soil fertility through nitrogen fixing, preparing the way for renewed biodiversity.
2. A traditional choice for igniting fires. Burns hot and bright.
3. A networked project adding nutrition and fertility to European social movements through training and capacity building. It kindles the realisation of social justice, ecological intelligence, and cognitive vitality.
