In this time of rapid technological change, how do we hold onto our humanity? How do stories, traditions, and community help us find meaning in loss and face an uncertain future? How can science, art, and spirituality open new pathways to understanding ourselves and the human experience?

PAUL SHRIVASTAVA (Co-President, The Club of Rome) discusses the need for a holistic, eco-civilizational future, emphasizing that science, technology, and economics are important but not the whole picture. He shares the importance of embodied, emotional, and spiritual learning as essential to evolving human consciousness in a technologically dominated world.

BAYO AKOMOLAFE (Philosopher, Founder of Emergence Network) shares a story about the loss of his father and how it forced him to mature quickly and become the breadwinner for his family. He reflects on the lessons learned from his children, especially his autistic son, who teaches him about grace, possibility, and futurity.

MICHEL FORST (Human Rights Advocate & the UN Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders) explores how theology and meditation serve as ongoing sources of inspiration, shaping his values and career choices in human rights advocacy.

DR. GUY LESCHZINER (Neurologist, Author of The Nocturnal Brain) on the concept of free will, suggesting that much of what we do is influenced by factors beyond our control. He discusses the importance of striving to make the world better, the role of sleep and dreams in memory and emotional processing, and the future of education.

EIREN CAFFALL (Author of All the Water in the World) highlights the importance of preserving knowledge and human history, imagining how future generations might rebuild society after catastrophe by holding onto stories, traditions, and the hope of repair.

DR. FERNANDO GARCÍA-MORENO (Neuroscientist) explains that while our brains have not changed biologically for thousands of years, cultural evolution has accelerated. He emphasizes the unique human roles of generating and transmitting knowledge across generations.

NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA (Author of Another World Is Possible: Lessons for America From Around the Globe) shares her inspiration from the generosity and hope she encounters in others, and describes how she's inspired by connecting with nature.

IRVIN WEATHERSBY JR. (Author of In Open Contempt) reflects on the influence of his church upbringing, music, and his grandmother on his writing and creative expression.

Today, we talk about creativity—not as a luxury, but as a national strategy. Sheila Deegan is one of Ireland’s leading cultural architects. Over three decades, she’s shaped the artistic life of Limerick and helped reimagine the role of creativity in civic life. She now serves in the Creative Ireland Programme, a bold cross-government initiative that sees culture as a force for personal and national wellbeing. From children’s creative freedom to climate action, from local festivals to cross-border partnerships, Creative Ireland asks a radical question: what happens when a country places imagination at the heart of public policy? Sheila Deegan joins me now to talk about that question—about culture, community, the role of art in a divided world, and what it means to build something lasting through the machinery of government.

"I left the local environment to pursue Creative Ireland because I really believe in this broader approach. Let's try not to silo things. Let’s try and get people working collaboratively for the benefit of everybody, not just one program over the other. I really hope that young people can hold a sense of social justice as we move forward into a very complicated world. They need to remember that we're all just people and that we all just need each other, whether that's creatively or within the landscape or within the economics."

Episode Website

www.creativeprocess.info/pod

Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“I work in between archeology and anthropology in this field called either historical archeology or contemporary archeology. At the heart of that is the relationship between objects and humans. How do we write about the past or the present in terms of listening to human voices or evidence from things where maybe human voices have been erased or haven't left as much of a mark on the written records as others? Wrapped up with that, though, is always the risk of dehumanization, of the treatment of human lives as if the boundary between a subject and an object is one that is permeable, not in a sort of positive way, but in a more sinister way. There is a long history of people being treated as things.”

In this episode of Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Dan Hicks about the present’s responsibility to itself. How do not only monuments, but also the very idea of monumentality, serve to mystify and perpetuate beliefs that maintain social orders that deserve to be strenuously re-evaluated? Archaeologist and anthropologist Dan Hicks traces the development of a particularly virulent strain of monument-worship, that which emerges out of what he calls “militarist realism,” which harnesses technologies of war, particularly colonial, white supremacist war, to build institutions, disciplines, museums in its image in order to permanently maintain a border between those deemed human subjects and the object-worlds of the non-human—which includes racial others. Rather than grant the past immunity, Hicks argues that we need to decide for ourselves what we chose to remember, and what deserves to be forgotten.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. He has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan's books include The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence and cultural restitution (Pluto 2020) and Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann 2025). Bluesky/Insta: @ProfDanHicks

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