Hamid Sardar-Afkhami

Hamid Sardar-Afkhami is a documentary film maker and photographer with a Ph.D. from Harvard University in the field of Inner Asian languages and cultures. He began his career in film-making as a graduate student while exploring the Himalayas as an associate of the Harvard Film Study Center and as a National Geographic Society explorer. Inspired by the pioneers of exploration photography,…

Brian Milani

Brian Milani writes and teaches on green political-economy and social change in Toronto. He has offered courses at York University, OISE/University of Toronto, the Transformative Learning Centre, and the Labour Education Centre. He wrote Designing the Green Economy: The Postindustrial Alternative to Corporate Globalization (2000); Building Materials in a Green Economy: Community-Based Strategies…

Conscious Evolution: A Metaphysical Task

The worldwide transformational movement has gained enough critical mass to ensure meaningful impact on our future. But conscious evolution doesn’t come by way of just transforming thoughts and behaviors. It emerges through cultural transfiguration—through metaphysically changing our very ground of being by setting a paradigmatically new fulcrum point for the pendulum of time and space. There is…

Hunters and Shamans of Mongolia

Artist Statement My journey as a photographer and as an ethnographer has been a personal pilgrimage. I am in search of the very soul of the people, the place, and culture. Images of primal people have always elevated me. There’s a humanness aspect of the struggle and the survival that you have in common with these people, but the context may be utterly exotic. I see my work veering towards a…

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The Predicament of Knowledge: A Challenge for Culture Design

Imagine if we collectively knew all that is needed to solve the hardest social problems in the world. Whether it’s political corruption or mass poverty, ecological devastation or terrorism, the refugee crisis or structural racism, the root causes for all of these issues are deeply and systemically cultural. So what if we already knew how to design changes in culture and solve problems like…

gallery four | World Press Photo Awards 2016

The World Press Photo Foundation is a major force in developing and promoting the work of visual journalists with a range of activities and initiatives that span the globe. The photos below represent some of the winners in 2016. worldpressphoto.org ©Sergey Ponomarev, 16 September 2015, Reporting Europe’s Refugee Crisis. Refugees arrive by boat on the Greek island of Lesbos. ©Sergey…

James Maskell

With the soul of an advocate and the mind of an entrepreneur, James Maskell has spent the past decade sparking debate, shifting paradigms, and working to accelerate the evolution of medicine—starting with the doctors themselves. By empowering conventionally trained doctors, James is encouraging a seismic shift away from an overdependence on western medicine and toward a wellness-centered,…

Millennials and the Shifting Political Climate: A Chance for Libertarianism to Emerge

The 2016 presidential election has been a disaster for young people. Between the dishonest pandering of Hillary Clinton and the perceived boorishness of Donald Trump, many millennials are stuck in no man's land. But the future of politics may not be as bleak as it seems. Libertarian views will likely shape the ideologies of tomorrow, and as this shift occurs, millennials will become…

Open Group Practice: Eight Social Selves

In 2012, after retiring from my professional career, I was eager to participate in some of the practices I had read about that facilitated group practices aimed at realizing emergent capacities. My working hypothesis was that it could be possible for people to participate in ways that would catalyze new cognitive and conative capacities such as multi-perspectival awareness, sensory clarity,…