Kelli Rose PearsonPhD

[Re]generative imaginaries

Cultivating cultures of possibility for a healthy planet with arts-based practices

My 2025 doctoral dissertation at Wageningen University investigates how creative, arts-based methods can expand our collective imagination, challenge status quo thinking, and foster imaginative leadership to drive societal transitions toward regenerative sustainability.

The research emerged from a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship with the Sustainable Place-Shaping research network and drew on fieldwork in Wales, Cornwall and the Netherlands. Situated in the social sciences and education and learning sciences, it brought together theory and practice through experiments with creative methods, place-based research and collaborative inquiry.

Life beyond the checklist

Revitalizing the potential of environmental impact assessments through co-creation

I co-designed and facilitated the co-creative research process behind this peer-reviewed paper, and co-authored the resulting article. Working with researchers, practitioners and activists, we used real-world cases from Kenya and Laos to explore how Environmental Impact Assessment could move beyond a largely procedural exercise and become a more meaningful process for understanding what is at stake when places undergo change.

The process led to the development of a Co-Creative Relational Impact Assessment Process (CoRIAP), which broadens what counts as relevant knowledge and impact.

Imaginative Leadership

A Conceptual Frame for the Design and Facilitation of Creative Methods and Generative Engagement

Published in Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship, this chapter introduces imaginative leadership as a way of understanding and intentionally working with the deeper frames, metaphors and assumptions that shape how we see the world. I identify a set of transformative mindsets and explore how creative methods can be deliberately designed to activate them.

The chapter traces the process of translating these mindsets into workshop methods and experiments with arts-based, embodied and experiential approaches that can interrupt familiar patterns of thought.

Once Upon the Future

Everyday Adventures that Change the World

Once Upon the Future is a collection of stories co-created from sustainability research, using fiction and imagination to translate research about possible futures into stories for young readers. I helped develop, edit and design the book from initial concept through publication.

My story, The Legend of the Cosmos Mariners, follows twelve-year-old Arlo, who discovers that his eccentric aunt's tales of a secret society of environmental protectors may not be stories after all.

The Last Laugh

In The World We Cannot Map

Written for The World We Cannot Map, a collection developed through the SHiFT COST Action after I was selected through an international open call to participate in a writing retreat in France. The project explored how fiction can disrupt habitual ways of seeing and open new ways of thinking about climate change and possible futures.

The Last Laugh is a humorous story set at the opening of an ecological forest cemetery in Savannah, where two old adversaries clash over whether the land should become a living memorial or much-needed housing.

On Trash, Exes and Things That Don't Magically Disappear

In The Last Plastic Fork

Runner-up in the 2025 Green Stories flash fiction competition and published in The Last Plastic Fork and Other Green Epiphanies. A darkly comic story about the things we throw away—and the inconvenient fact that they don't simply disappear.