Introduction—Pre-beyond

Abstract

In the introduction we outline what we do in the book. We also describe the critical/collective/auto/ethnographic research method that generated the author driven narratives, poems, playscripts, fables and essays that we use. We explain our process of writing the book and we suggest to readers how they can use the book.

Interlude: Invitation to Come Along (To Ourselves and Readers)

We invite you to join us and come along on the journey that is this book. In preparation for this journey we invite you to join us in engaging with familiar and unfamiliar materials. You may chose to consciously adopt an open-minded stance and a willingness to consider going along with a variety of flows. Together we might be challenged, and we might critically engage with some of the ideas presented here, you might disagree with us, and might encounter a variety of sensations and tensions that we sit with and invite you to sit with.

We imagine you coming into this book, turning the pages, opening doors, and entering imagined spaces with ‘Innocence’, ‘Tomorrows’ and ‘Francis Bacons’ that we have initially imagined and described. As you engage with these spaces, we invite you to interpret and generate senses and meanings of the objects within.

We invite you to join us in experiencing this book as a generative space. As a space that can be made sense of by drawing on existing ways of knowing generated in the past, by putting these ways of knowing into conversation with perhaps new objects and offerings in the present, and by using these to imagine future possibilities.