Intention and Tension: A Four-Year Journey of Hope, Despair and Integration

Over the past four years, I have undertaken a deeply personal, self-directed project researching the relationship between intention and tension, framed through various lenses (including art and health). This inquiry is fundamentally an investigation into what happens when tension (despair) is embraced and how intention setting can both shape and transform the experience of stress, personal hardship, and social dynamics into opportunities for growth.

Each year of the project was structured around a specific intention, embodied through immersive, year-long challenges:

Year 1 (2021-2022): A vow of silence to explore the intention to listen (and ignorance).

Year 2 (2022-2023): A year spent exclusively in fancy dress (costumes), delving into the intention to play (and stress).

Year 3 (2023-2024): A year dedicated to being ‘in service’, focusing on the intention to love (and neglect).

Year 4 (2024-2025): Currently four months into living completely barefoot, I am exploring the intention to empower, and how this relates to the state of overwhelm.

This project has been entirely self-funded, unaffiliated with academic institutions, and rooted in lived, embodied research. It has been both transformative and challenging, involving profound moments of mental, physical, and social strain. Yet, within these struggles I have cultivated frameworks for resilience, meaning and a story worth sharing.

In alignment with this years APS conference theme, my presentation will reflect on how intentional practice can reframe personal crises, transforming despair into spaces of hope. My journey offers insights into the psychosocial dynamics of resilience, the role of embodied practice in navigating life’s challenges, and how self-imposed constraints can open pathways to empowerment.

I hope to share my story, reflections, and findings with the APS community, contributing to conversations on how we can navigate life’s tensions with purpose and hope.

With the Earth warming at an unprecedented rate and a worldwide biodiversity crisis, the need for sustainability transitions – large-scale societal change to address sustainability challenges – has never been more apparent. Yet the potential for transformation is arguably limited by a widespread sense that radical action is unrealistic or even impossible. This sense has far-reaching consequences, for actual possibility is shaped by beliefs about viability. Fashion Fictions, an international collective imagination project founded in 2020, responds to this predicament by bringing people together to generate, explore and reflect on engaging fictional visions of sustainable worlds, with a particular focus on fashion systems. The project has involved over 6000 participants to date, generating new stories and, for many participants, inspiring hope about the possibility of change.

A new phase of work will shift the focus from the creation of positive visions to the process of transition. ‘Backstories’ generated by project contributors – explanations of how each fictional world came to split off from our own world – will be used in participatory enactment workshops. In many of these fictional accounts, the split takes place at a moment of crisis; a period of transformation typically follows, in which new systems and norms are established. The workshops are intended to enable participants to experience, albeit in an intentionally safe and distanced way, the grief and hope that radical change might entail, on both a personal and a societal level.

This presentation will share the thinking behind this new initiative and invite dialogue with the Psychosocial Studies community. I would be interested to discuss the potential benefits, and dangers, of using fiction and enactment to explore crisis; any comparable initiatives that could provide inspiration or guidance; and possible ways of evaluating the impacts on those taking part.