Joost Vervoort is Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination in the Environmental Governance Group at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development.
These days Joost’s work focuses on how creative sectors and practices can help transform societies towards better futures. His interest connects individual experience, societal practices, and infrastructures of the imagination. Most recently, he focuses on ‘infrastructures of mystery’ – engaging with the question of what a society looks like that creates infrastructural possibilities for a profoundly different, deeper connection to life, nature, and other people.
Joost is a game designer, co-helming a team of game industry veterans working on the game All Will Rise – a game about taking billionaires to court for destroying the planet that has been featured in the Guardian and major global video games media.
He is also a singer in the metal band Terzij de horde, a black metal band that has turned into a lively creative practice with a lot of overlap with his academic and societal interests.
Joost is currently part of the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES which focuses on how the European game industry can help imagine a better future; and for five years he has led the ANTICIPLAY Vidi project which was a precursor focusing on games for better futures, and which is still active as a platform and community. He was a lead on evaluation and impact for the Horizon 2020 project CreaTures: the 9 Dimensions model developed for this project is currently in wide use in the creative sectors.
Joost has several other connected university roles: he is Program Leader for the Copernicus program on impact and theories of change; leader of the Transforming Cities Community for the Pathways to Sustainability Program; a member of the Futures Special Interest Group; and a co-lead of the Imagination and Anticipation Taskforce for the Earth System Governance network together with Manjana Milkoreit.
An ecologist by training, Joost holds a PhD from Wageningen University which focused on supporting different societal perspectives in navigating complex societal challenges related to sustainability, framed by social-ecological systems thinking and transition/transformation research. He then worked for seven years at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, before coming to UU.
Joost has published widely on foresight, anticipatory governance, transformations, and simulation gaming. He was a PI of the global scenarios project for the CGIAR's Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security programme for 10 years. In this last capacity, he has led over 150 high-level foresight and anticipation processes to guide major policies and strategies in many global regions. A sister project, RE-IMAGINE, led to critical research on anticipatory governance.
Seeking to break through the limits of current ways of working with the future, Joost is currently focusing on:
Imagination infrastructures: what are the conditions that enable widespread societal participation in the imagination of the future? Financial, physical, cultural, institutional and ecological infrastructures can support or restrict the transformative potential of public imaginations. Joost is investigating this both in the context of urban transformation and in specific creative sectors like the games industry.
Infrastructures of Mystery: how can a society support the widely different practices and experiences that give people access to the wonder of experience? This is a project developed in the context of Transforming Cities. It seeks to connect the most ineffable with the most practical and programmatic by linking infrastructure and mystery.
Joost is also a Honorary Research Associate at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford and a Visiting Fellow at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto Japan.
He is PhD supervisor to a number of students:
Carien Moossdorff focuses on the joy of creating institutions, with a specific focus on how games can help people experiment with this joy.
Kyle Thompson focuses on how games can help us ‘stay with the trouble’ through presence and resonance in the face of transformation.
Nina Breedveld focuses on democratic resonance – how do people feel a sense of connection with the messy politics of societal change?
Frank Kimenai focuses on the music industry in terms of ecosystems and resilience thinking.
Matthes Lindner connects games and societal change in the STRATEGIES project.
A number of fantastic PhD researchers have graduated with Joost in a supervisor role in recent years. These include:
- Dr. Meghan Bailey - focusing on participatory adaptation and agricultural systems change;
- Dr. Aniek Hebinck - focusing on food system transitions;
- Dr. Sean Low who researched the politics and practices of anticipation around climate engineering;
- Dr. Dhanush Dhinesh who focused on agricultural science-policy engagement;
- Dr. Astrid Mangnus, who researched participatory futures approaches for societal transformations;
- Dr. Karlijn Muiderman, who researched how anticipatory processes act as sites of governance and politics;
- Dr. Lucas Rutting, who researched how foresight processses could become more politically reflexive.
As a teacher, Joost leads the transdisciplinary course 'Global Transformation Project' as part of the BSc program Global Sustainability Science. In Global Transformation Project, students work together directly with policy makers and national experts in countries around the world to develop transformation pathways. Joost also leads the course 'The Sustainability Game', a unique collaboration between Utrecht University and Utrecht University of the Arts (HKU). In this course, students work together to build digital games that engage players with sustainable futures. Finally, Joost teachers the MSc course Theories of Change in Action, where groups of students critically investigate their own theories of change and apply them in real world interventions and cases.