The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity
Welcome to Syncreate, where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology, and spirituality. Our goal is to demystify the creative process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative.
Creativity. It’s a word we throw around all the time, but what does it really mean? On the Syncreate Podcast, we share stories of the creative journey. We talk to changemakers, visionaries and everyday creatives working in a wide array of fields and disciplines. Our goal is to explore creativity in all its facets, and to gain a better understanding of the creative process – from imagination to innovation and everything in between.
The Syncreate Podcast is hosted by Melinda Rothouse, PhD. She helps individuals and organizations bring their creative dreams and visions to life through coaching, consulting, workshops, retreats, and now, this podcast. She's written two books on creativity, including Syncreate: A Guide to Navigating the Creative Process for Individuals, Teams, and Communities (winner of a Silver Nautilus Award for Creativity and Innovation), with Charlotte Gullick. She's also a musician (singer-songwriter and bass player) and photographer based in Austin, Texas.
The Syncreate Podcast: Empowering Creativity
Episode 91: Envisioning the Possible with Vlad Glaveanu, PhD
How do we use our creativity to envision possibility and bring it into reality? Vlad Glăveanu, PhD, has spent his career exploring this question. He is the founder and president of the Possibility Studies Network (PSN). His work focuses on creativity, imagination, culture, collaboration, wonder, possibility, and societal challenges. He is a professor of psychology in the School of Psychology and Director of the DCU Centre for Possibility Studies at Dublin City University, as well as a professor at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology, University of Bergen. He has written and edited numerous academic articles and books on creativity and possibility studies, as well as The Wish Thief, a fantasy novel.
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, we encourage you to pay attention to your immediate environment and to look at familiar scenes and objects with fresh eyes, considering the possibilities of each beyond their everyday, conventional purpose or use.
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process, you might also like our conversations in Episode 16: Creativity, Innovation & Leadership with Robert Cleve, PhD Episode 62: The Neuroscience of Creativity with Dr. Indre Viskontas, and Episode 77: Collaborate, Innovate, Advocate with Beth Sundstrom, PhD.
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching, including a monthly creativity coaching group, to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information on our website. Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review! We’d love to hear your feedback as well, so drop us a line at info@syncreate.org.
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Melinda: Creativity and community are absolutely vital in challenging times. Welcome to Syncreate, a show where we explore the intersections between creativity, psychology and spirituality. We believe everyone has the capacity to create. Our goal is to demystify the process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. We talk with visionaries and change makers, and everyday creatives working in a wide range of fields and media - from the arts to science, technology and business.
We aim to illuminate the creative process, from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothouse and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life. At Synceate, we’re here to support your creative endeavors. So if you have an idea for a project or a new venture and you're not quite sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. We're here to help.
Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools and coaching to help bring your work to the world, including both one-on-one coaching and a monthly creativity coaching group that happens the fourth Sunday of every month. So, check it out on the website.
We'd also love to hear your feedback on the show, so drop us a line at info@syncreate.org. We'd love to hear your feedback, as well as ideas for future topics or guests that you'd like to see us cover.
So, my guest today is Doctor Vlad Glaveanu. He's a professor of Psychology at Dublin City University in Ireland, as well as at the Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology at the University of Bergen. He's the founder and president of the Possibility Studies Network, and his work focuses on creativity, imagination, culture, collaboration and much more. He is the author and/or editor of many academic books and articles on these fields, including Creativity Possibility Studies, and so on. Originally from Romania, he's also a fiction writer, and his debut novel is called The Wish Thief. So Vlad, welcome to the show. I'm so happy to have you today.
Vlad: Thank you so much for the invite. Excited to be here.
Melinda: Yes. And I'm glad we could work it out with our timezone difference. You’re in Ireland. And I'm here in Austin. So. glad we could work that out.
Vlad: Yeah. It’s a small world. (Laughter)
Melinda: It is, and soon enough I will be there at the Possibility Studies Conference, which is coming up quickly at the end of June/beginning of July, so, definitely want to touch on that in our conversation.
Vlad: Yes.
Melinda: Yeah. But so, you're the founder of the Possibility Studies Network. And Possibility Studies is a field closely related to creativity. Which, we both kind of like to swim and play in that space. So, I'm curious just for our, you know, audience today that may not be so familiar, why Possibilities Studies? Like, why were you inspired to sort of start this new field of inquiry that’s similar to, but not exactly the same as creativity?
Vlad: That's a great question. Thank you so much for it. I mean, how many hours do we have? (Laughter)
Melinda: Exactly.
Vlad: No - I’ll try to brief. But just to say that, yes, I am kind of a founder, a co-founder. You know, it takes a village to make these big communities come together. And I work with so many people. I'm very fortunate to be part of a big community, a growing community that I consider you part of as well. So we're co-creating. We're co-creating this field. So what is the part - I can ask you as well. I will tell you why I came to the possible in so many ways. So, I am a Social Psychologist by training, and then I study Creativity, which is already a bit of an original thing to do in some ways, because a lot of people in my discipline, you know, they're cognitive, experimental, but whatever other psychometric, individual differences.
So, my questions have always been a little bit different. I wouldn't say they're very original because there are a lot of people even in Psychology, but especially in the Social Sciences, in Anthropology, in Art, Education, who ask about context. But for me, the context of creativity has always been extremely important. So, the way I like to say it, context is not the background. It's actually the phenomenon, you know, coming together. So, I worked on what I call distributed creativity for a while, and then the Five As framework, and then things that I can talk about more extensively if you want me to.
But I kind of caught myself after 10, close to 15 years of doing this work, writing the same sentence in different ways. (Laughter) Creativity does not take place only in the head. It's not for isolated minds and geniuses, and you know , it is in between people and spaces and places and culture and so on. And I thought, “Okay, well, I need to go deeper…” You know, with myself and understand why do I study creativity? What got me into it? And, it is the possible. It is the possible. It is this idea of becoming aware, of sensing, feeling and acting on what might be or what might become and then choosing, and, you know, ethically thinking about if something is possible should it become real? And things like that.
So, I wrote a book some years ago, now called The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory. That says kind of my positioning. And I'm very happy later to tell you how I look at the possible. But, basically following that, I started conversations with people. And what possibility studies is - first of all, the words possible and possibility are quite common, which is a plus. People resonate. They understand implicitly a little bit of what it is, but it doesn't have that long history and sometimes quite charged history of, words like creativity or innovation, especially in others, that come with a particular baggage. Whether it's their fault (laughter) - saying it is going to be their fault. But, you know, people, if you say it's the innovation network, they think, “Oh, it's business, an enterprise. And I, you know, I don't know if I do that.”
Even for creativity, which is a topic that I fought with many others for a long time to kind of demonstrate that it's much more universal than just the arts or even than just, you know, capitalists, impulses to create goods and consumer. And, there is so much more to it. But, you know, it's still within that discourse. So, I think Possibility Studies gives us a chance to project and participate in a over-arching kind of category, because what happens and what's really beautiful is that, we have people who work on agency, creativity, imagination, inspiration, awe, curiosity, wonder, serendipity, counterfactuals, futures, thinking, utopias, dystopias. I mean, you stop me there. There's so many fields. (Laughter)
And they genuinely come from many, many, disciplines. So it's very inter/transdisciplinary. So, we're trying to break down those silos, academic and also practice space silos, but also to meet in the middle, in these big questions around novelty. How do new things come about, right? The nature of change. What is our theory of change? How does transformation happen? Or the ethics of possibility? How do we choose, you know, among things and so on. So, it's new, it's fresh, it's kind of intriguing for people, but it actually has a very long history. If you look at the many things that make it up. And finally, just to say my favorite metaphor is that of the forest. You know, I feel like with creativity you have this big tree, the creativity tree, and I'm on the sociocultural branch, somewhere there, you know. (Laughter)
With the probably cross-cultural and social and, you know, and there are many other branches that I don't often visit, like the neuroscience of creativity, but they're there. They're in the tree. But the thing is, where we are, as the saying goes, “Sometimes we're missing the forest because we're looking at only every tree.” And what is the forest? The forest is possibility, so that it's like a mangrove forest. That’s how I imagine it's, you know, with things that connect at a deeper level, in terms of roots and canopy and so on. So, yeah. These are the things that animate kind of all of us. And they're the big questions of the day in many ways.
Melinda: Yeah, I love that. And I love that metaphor because it kind of brings to mind, you know, what is the wider environment in which all of this creativity possibility is taking place? And so many of the words that you mentioned in your description just now, they have a kind of a positive, kind of forward looking connotation to them. Right. And, and I often liken creativity to, you know, there's this quality about it where we're kind of imagining, right? What could be and then, bringing it into being. And so, it's kind of this amazing process, but just given everything that's going on in the world today, so many crises and wars and conflicts, I find it very exciting to be participating in a dialog and a conversation that opens up possibilities. Right? Rather than shutting things down or as you mentioned, kind of siloing things into these separate categories.
Vlad: Yeah. Thank you. I think you're right. I mean, l call it the audacity of hope. You know, we live in quite hopeless Dystopian worlds right now. (Laughter) But there is something about the lens of looking at the world through the lens of agency, the lens of empowerment, the lens of participation. And there's the big, you know, discourse and the big practice that we kind of draw from. I do - and this is an interesting point that maybe we'll get to talk about as well - you know, their darker sides, the possibility also. And it’s interesting to think about like, in anxiety, the fears are in the realm of the possible. In depression, all the kind of rumination and all these, you know, it's not here but it's still tormenting people.
Or counterfactual research has a lot of, you know, the negative counterfactual effects in the where the positive - like, “This bad thing might not have happened if…”, you know, can really torment people. So, I think it opens up so many beautiful questions, but at the end of the day, it tries to recognize the fundamental openness of human existence. We are not predetermined. The world is not yet given, as Bakhtin would have said. So, yeah, I completely resonate with this kind of overarching positive ethos. And it's positive and it's also critical, as we all need to be.
Melinda: Of course. Of course. And that's why, I'm going to be coming to the conference. Really looking forward to it. And we've put together a panel kind of looking at, you know, creativity and collaboration in challenging times, and how do we work with that and how do we channel it? And as you point out, you know, there are darker sides of creativity. And creativity can be used for more nefarious purposes as well.
Vlad: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Melinda: Yeah. So I'm curious, as a sort of researcher in this realm of creativity and possibility, what's top of mind for you at the moment? (Laughter)
Vlad: Oh my god. Yeah. It's tough. I have a very distributed, really chaotic mind. (Laughter) And, you know, I was talking to colleagues. And one of the things that fascinates me - because, you know, there are possibilities of our own life. You can look at life possibilities. So, like, the life and the choices we make, and our identities in ourselves as creative projects, and so on. So, I was talking about the constraints and the chance events that shape things. So, oftentimes we like to think, yes - the way I gave you a narrative in some ways, I mean, it has truth to it. It's my truth. But, that I moved a bit from, you know… that the bridge was wonder.
Actually, that's another great topic that I'm fascinated with between creativity and the possible. But at the same time, it's the encounter. It's the things we do. So I don't have this great plan. The master plan. Or maybe it will become a master plan if it's ever enacted. (Laughter) But I don't have, you know, a big vision necessarily. What I do at the moment - actually, I do have a few things that really obsess me. I'm quite obsessive with these (laughter) - but one of them is interventions. And when I say interventions it’s the link between theory and practice. It's kind of, you know, I call them possibility spaces.
It's understanding the toolkits we have. How do we work with possibilities in ways that are less prescribed as more established methodologies, like design thinking or things that are quite, you know, they have their ways? But I think to do justice to the possible, we can't have formulas. So what do we have? You know, we have principles. We have ways of working. So, I'm interested in the kind of good we can do in the world with this type of thinking. So, that's one thing that I'm exploring. Another is to link type of, you know, possibilities with the kind of literacy. And here, this is a world premiere that I'm telling you this…
Melinda: Oh, great. Awesome.
Vlad: Because it’s very recent. (Laughter) Yeah. This is the breaking news, the scoop. (Laughter) But I'm working with a colleague from the US, Catrinel Tromp, to look at possibilities literacy, Because, again, I'm in touch with a lot of communities of futures literacy. And you have digital and, you know, today we have an AI literacy and everything. So, it's a bit of an overall inflation of things. But the idea of literacy is fascinating to me because it taps into much more than a competency. It's not about individual abilities to me and to many people in the field. It is really an orientation, a set of habits, a mindset. And I think a lot of what we try to do with possibilities is that wide ranging thing, rather than sometimes with creativity, we also go to quite narrow things.
Melinda: Indeed.
Vlad: You know, when you make a profile it’s divergent thinking, convergent thinking and, you know, verbal and visual - it's a catalog. But literacy, if we use possibility - and this is where we're writing now about that. So, I'll keep you posted. Maybe there will be a second podcast when this is launched - but it's helped by the idea of literacy because it gives it a framing that people resonate with. And they get, you know, we are concerned with literacies. And today we need literacies that involve us in the uncertain, and managing ambivalence and tension and unpredictability. So that's a big part of it. But it also can help us rethink what we mean by literacy because of this open endedness and non-linearity and everything that it brings. So yeah. Yeah, that is top of my mind.
Melinda: I love that.
Vlad: Two topics. (Laughter)
Melinda: Yeah. Well, and what that brings up for me - I appreciate that so much because I, you know, having always a foot in and outside of academia, it's really important to me that the research and the work that we do in an academic context gets out into the wider world and can be of benefit, and can be accessible to the wider world.
So, it sounds like this work, with kind of possibility literacy is a step in that direction. Right? To kind of identify like, what are these universal capacities and how can people work with them?
Vlad: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Melinda: Beautiful. Well, tell us a little bit more about the conference you have coming up.
Vlad: Conference. Yeah. Well, this is our highlight of the year. We have quite a few highlights. I have to say, we are full of events and I can tell you about those as well. But the conference is when we meet many of us. So you know, we're looking at around 200 people associated with these type of events. And we're kind of moving around with it. So, Cambridge University organized it last year. We're coming back to Ireland, again in world premiere. It's very likely we're returning to the UK next Theory meeting. Theory in Brighton.
So anyway, we'll have to we'll have to fine tune some of those details, but yes, it is moving. One day it will come to Australia. One day it will go to the US or other places. Who knows? We have partners in many places. But it is kind of where we put our principles into practice. So, if you look at the program, artists and designers and performance art, and workshops and panels and you know, live music, and it is like a celebration of us coming together. And there is a lot of discussion there, a lot of presentations.
There's a lot of knowledge dissemination and production, hopefully. But most of all, it really is kind of really re-energizing us. You know, it's one of these things where we get to meet. We also get to meet online for - well, the winter conference is very kind of north centered, but the January conference, we have kind of every half year - we meet online and in person, so that we get people, give them a chance - because some people cannot travel. We can't get everybody. So we have these other events in January. There's online. Then we have lecture series and weekly seminars, and we're crazy like that. (Laughter) So there are plenty of opportunities to meet like-minded people, to discuss, to share.
But yes, it's going to be, I think, fabulous. That's why we do it. It's a week long. We're crazy with these kind of long events. (Laughter) Because we like for people to have the chance to kind of really sit with some of those ideas. And, you know, especially when you make a big trip as you would, it's kind of nice to really meet some people, and really have those conversations. I often find that regular conferences, you know, you get the ideas, and everybody's out already. They're going to the airport. (Laughter) So, we really like doing that. Some of the highlights - we have an amazing set of keynotes. I'm not going to get into the details of everything because the program should be online on Possibility Studies Network.
We collaborate with Creative Ireland, which is a governmental program in Ireland that supports creativity across different layers of society, which is fantastic. You know, Ireland is kind of a country that embraces creativity as an identity in many ways, so that's fantastic. And we have an amazing number of people coming from abroad. It always, you know, it humbles me to see because I'm going to be close to home, to be honest, with this one. But just the amount of energy and enthusiasm, you know. Again, from Arizona or the d.school, and Canada and Montreal, and the circus - the School of Circus too - to the Sydney University of Technology, and other places even in Australia. Like, it is our meeting space, basically.
Melinda: Yeah. Beautiful. And I can attest, having just come from the creativity conference at Southern Oregon University that Mark Runco organizes, it's just such a lovely way - you know, we're so much in this digital space, as you and I are today, that it's so wonderful to come together in person with colleagues and just connect in that way and form lasting connections. You know, potentially new collaborations, exchanging ideas. It's wonderful. So, great. And then you also publish a journal, Possibility Studies & Society, which I am now quite familiar with. Tell us a little bit more about the journal and the kinds of work that you’re publishing.
Vlad: Yeah. Listen, that's one of the biggest achievements, probably of the whole project, because it's so hard to start a journal. I mean, I've been editing an online open access journal for decades before I passed it on in the meantime. But people can start things and it's beautiful when they do. But sometimes you have to work with these established publishers. And for us, Sage and for me, it's been always very close to my heart. So, they do a lot of social science and human science. So, I was delighted when they were interested. It's so hard because, I don't know, early journals are a risky endeavor. (Laughter)
But we're filling it up with these amazing, to my mind, contributors. If you look at the special issues. A lot of it is special issues and kind of thematic sections based. But we have a stream of independent submissions as well. And we try with it to break a bit the boundaries of traditional publishing. So we invite more creative ways of engagement and writing. There is always the challenge of finding the right reviewers and understanding how quality translates in different disciplines and areas. So, that is our more academic communication in some ways.
Although again, you know, we are trying to make things as useful as possible in this - not in a narrow sense, but, you know, meaningful, if you want. But we also have, just to say a magazine that we published called Possibility Perspectives, which again, it's linked to our website of the PSN. And that's created by our members and it has an ISBN, so it's kind of registered one, but it is about getting these other stories/other perspectives that don't have to go through peer review to be put out there.
So, it started as a bit of our newsletter in some ways, but then we have these few editions that are accumulating. And in the conference bag, you're going to get your “P Squared”. We call it Possibly Perspectives. The double p. So “P Squared”. So, we were really trying to diversify the ways in which, and the kinds of things we tell each other. Right. So we have email lists and we have these seminars, and magazines and journals. So, it's great. Yeah.
Melinda: Wonderful. Yeah. Great. And so, you know, another thing I want to touch on, you also write fiction and you have a novel out, called The Wish Thief. And, you know, just strikes me that so many of us working in the fields of creativity and possibility, we are interested in these topics because we are also creatives working in a variety of genres. So, tell us a little bit more about that book and about your fiction writing.
Vlad: Oh! It's very nice that you're asking me about that, because I feel like this is my hobby in some ways. (Laughter) You know, it's very nice to decide, but I absolutely love it. I don't have time almost to write, but I love fantasy. So, this is supposed to be and will be a trilogy of course. Of course it’s a trilogy.
Melinda: Of course. (Laughter)
Vlad: And I'm writing now the second book and it's taking a million years, but I'm kind of, you know, a third through or a quarter through, The Wish Tree, which is the second volume, as it were, in the trilogy. And, you know, it goes back to what we talked about, like wishing and wishes are a fantastic topic for Possibilities Studies. We kind of forgot in psychology at least. It got lumped with psychoanalysis with a lot of things that people find a bit mysterious or vague. But, actually, at the Cambridge edition of our conference, I worked with Kim Wilkins who’s from Australia, from Queensland, and she's an author, and she's absolutely delightful and fantastic.
Works with storytelling and creativity. And we presented on wishful thinking or wishful imagination. You know, wishful thinking has a bad press in some ways that mind wandering had. But actually, we discovered the potential of the possibility within it. So, this idea of making wishes to me is about kind of putting out there visions of what you would like to happen that are so strongly emotional and felt, that I think it's fascinating to think about.
So The Wish Thief as the novel, the premise - and I love thinking of premises and sometimes like aging with flash fiction and little short things where you just imagine a different world. Right? So it's kind of medieval. It's fantasy. It's there. It's in that universe. People don't have iPhones. (Laughter) But, you know, it is about everybody is born with a wish to make. One wish that will happen, will come true, unless you ask for completely, you know, exaggerated out of this world things. But that wish will happen, so that becomes the organizing principle of that world, and that invites kind of reflection on, “What should I wish for, but also fear? What would other people wish for?”
So, it's kind of a wish order, you know, is created so that people get to make wishes in a wise way. And it follows the story of Lia, who's the main character - she’s a teenage girl - who has a very strong, powerful wish. It is only one, it is not a chosen type of narrative. (Laughter) So, it’s not to say that, you know, alarm bells are ringing. No, more people can have these powerful wishes. And she doesn't want to make any wish, which is almost like a crime in that universe.
So, she doesn't know what to wish for, doesn't want her life to change. And the first book is as the title suggests, there is a kind of a mysterious thing happening that makes her go through different adventures and kind of reconnect with this idea of the wish, you know, that she can make and look at it differently. And I'm not going to tell you if the wish is made or not, by the end. (Laughter)
Melinda: Gotta read the book.
Vlad: People should read. (Laughter) But there is also an audiobook, by the way. The book was read by the fantastic Dana Rowe, who's amazing. So, those who like listening in can actually listen to the whole thing.
Melinda: Great. Great. Yeah. It's interesting to think about if you only had one wish and you had to think very carefully,
Vlad: Right.
Melinda: What would you wish for if you knew it could come true? Yeah. Yeah.
Vlad: Well, you know, wish making is such a theme across human history. But if you look at storytelling, if you look at the stories around wishes… I mean, the whole thing of Disney.
Melinda: Yeah. Three wishes. Yeah.
Vlad: It is based on - and like, we don't want to get too copyrighted, but what was that song… I think it was famous from Cinderella. I’m not going to sing anything. Don't worry. (Laughter) - “A dream is a wish your heart makes…” Or something like that. You know, very famous lines. And the Disney 100 was the movie Wish.
Melinda: Right. There you go.
Vlad: What more? What else is there? Like, these are the people who populate our imaginary. So clearly it's so simple.
Melinda: Yeah. Absolutely. And kind of back to creativity and possibility. I think that anything new that comes into being ultimately has to start with some kind of a wish, or at least an idea of what could be. You know, back to the theme of possibility. But isn't yet in existence. So, it's very powerful. Yeah.
Vlad: Yeah. Thank you. So, yeah. You see there are parallels. I don't think of Possibilities Studies when I write fiction. (Laughter) Like, “The theory says it should be…” No. So, I kind of let it - what I enjoy - and if you have, you know, writing experience, love writing - where it's really being surprised almost by the story. I have a narrative, obviously, but it's often kind of challenging me and it goes in a direction, and I find myself writing things and I'm like, “Well, it's natural that that would happen.” So that's the beauty of it, really. It's never fully in your head.
Melinda: Yeah, yeah. Beautiful. So, I'm curious, like, when you talk with people who aren't academics, just people out in the world, about this idea of possibility, or maybe even kids. Right? I'm saying this because I usually like to conclude each episode with what I call a Creativity Pro Tip. So something that people can take and kind of try out on their own. So, for people that might not be so familiar with this field or this line of inquiry, what's something tangible that they could try out? Or when you talk to lay people or kids, you know, how do we get people starting to think about this realm of possibility?
Vlad: Ah! What a great question. Again, how many hours do we have? (Laughter) Well, I mean, there are many - like, I'm going to take now the ‘wonder’ thing that I told you I'm completely fascinated with. You know, wonder is about not knowing. But as a generative productive state, I mean, it's very Socratic. Again, it has a huge history spanning millennia. It's a shame we don't talk more about wonder. But philosophy, you know, according to Socrates, is born in wonder. Everything about this deep thought, deep thinking is about wonder and what wonder does. And this is where it's so interesting in relation to curiosity, which is, of course, something else that I love. Curiosity often takes you from not knowing to knowing.
Melinda: Yes.
Vlad: So you inquire. You're curious, you satisfy your curiosity. You never satisfy wonder. Wonder is not to be satisfied. That’s what makes it so frustrating at the same time. And it takes you from knowing to not knowing. So, one of the things that I love is to think, “Okay, I'm looking around and I think I've got it. I know what everything is around me here. But if I start asking a different question about what I see, I would discover that things and events and people and ideas, they're always more than I think they are.” So one of the things, for example, with very everyday objects like a cup or whatever… you know, you can think of the geometry of the cup, you can think about the music you can create with the cup, you can think about a poem that makes it an art object.
You can you can think of signing it and making a found art object. If you were Duchamp, you'd be millions. (Laughter) But that is a cup. I mean, that is the state of wonder. When basically you explode reality into these myriad possibilities. And of course, then there are other things people can do to sort and think about and kind of, you know, select. That's a huge one as well. What do we - what are our values? What do we prioritize? And so on. So, it's all reflection, all the way down. You know, it's turtles and reflection all the way down. So, that's what keeps me busy. That's what I love doing - is asking people and asking myself these out there questions. And that's what I would encourage as a daily practice. Almost like a little meditation of sorts.
Melinda: Absolutely. I love that because, you know, I think when we're young, we have that sense of wonder. Just, you know, everything is kind of new and fresh. And we're exploring and learning about the world. And then, as we get older, we tend to get more and more focused on the practicalities of everyday life. So, just kind of coming back to wonder is such a beautiful practice.
Vlad: Right. Right.
Melinda: Good. Well, if people want to learn more about your work, about the Possibility Studies Network, what are the best ways for them to learn more?
Vlad: Right. Well, so, we're very fortunate to have a network. Possibilities Studies Network which is possibilitystudies.net. And there you can go in About Us/Contact Us and you can put your email, and then you'll be on our email list. So you'll get to know everything, and explore with the website and so on.
Melinda: Great.
Vlad: But also, I'm a director of DCU, so Dublin City University which is my university here. Of a center - DCU Centre for Possibility Studies - and it's fresh, brand new. And we have a website now, which is great. So, people can look up that as well. And we have six themes we work on, and we will actually - and you'll be happy, you know, as you come to the conference - we’re going to officially launch the website. The website too. And the centre at DCU. On the Friday, take people by bus - and whoever wants to - we’re not kidnaping anybody - (laughter) - and kind of to another university and the Centre.
So, a very more formal, kind of launch. So yeah, there's the centre, there’s the network. And then for me personally, I'm not on social media much. I barely know what Instagram is and how it works. I didn't catch up. I'm studying actually, TikTok and stuff. (Laughter) I'm not on it. I’m on LinkedIn. It's very old school, very traditional. And yet my email is vlad.glaveanu@dcu.ie.
Melinda: Okay. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.
Melinda: Thank you.
Melinda: And look forward to seeing you in person at the conference.
Vlad: Can't wait. Thank you so much.
Melinda: Yeah. Absolutely. My pleasure. Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under @syncreate. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review or reach out to us at info@syncreate.org to connect.
We're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, Texas, with Doctor Glaveanu joining us from Dublin. The podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Thanks so much for being with us, and see you next time.
