Roisin Markham

I’ve begun consolidating this work as I find myself beginning to talk to others about it. Searching for images and post that are half written and unpublished, futile work, so it’s a page long over due.

My original draft was one page. As I began editing and continued writing, it got really really long. Its been interesting to realise I have been engaged with future ancestors work since 2021, not counting speculative design c. 2016 or creative visualisation workshops 1996 – 2015. A bit surprising to discover the thread runs so deep. Now it extends forwards and backwards.
I’m structuring the work and will share it in stages. This gives me time to write, edit and illustrate. I’ll create pages with deeper dives on influences, cultural thinking and perspectives. What it means in my own creative work or what I’m learning through doing the deep enquiry on living with the question how do we create a future worth living into? I think that may be forming into a book.

*Politics of reference came to my attention in February 2024, I came into contact with The Void, Derry and specifically in a reading circle facilitated by a curator called Cecelia Graham. I knew providence of thought, influence was important to me but Cecilia gave me a language for it. The “politics of reference” examines how citation and acknowledgment practices reflect and reinforce power structures, determining whose voices get amplified and whose knowledge is deemed legitimate in academic and public discourse. These seemingly neutral acts of referencing are actually political choices that can either challenge or perpetuate systemic inequalities based on gender, race, geography, and other hierarchies of privilege.
I realise this creates a huge dichotomy in my use of AI for text and images, this needs its own teasing out and is one of the reasons I did not mature my future ancestors portraits and stopped sharing the idea of them from December 2023 till fairly recently.

Why you might be asking, what’s the point?
In my work with futurism, speculative design and my role as an strategic consultant I’ve been spending time learning how to co-sense, listen more deeply, making space to ask different questions, and part of that work is a way of relating to time and responsibility that stretches beyond the present moment. The idea of future ancestors helps me remember that we are always shaping the conditions of life for others we may never meet.
This kind of thinking isn’t about predicting the future or trying to control what comes next. It’s about asking deeper questions about how we live now, and how our choices ripple out over time. It’s about making space to imagine other ways of being together—ways that are more caring, more creative, and more honest about the mess we’re in.
Sometimes this work looks like storytelling, or time-travelling through creative practices. Sometimes it’s about helping organisations pause, reflect, and take a longer view. Often, it’s about listening—really listening—to what’s already here, and what’s being asked of us.
I’m drawn to this because I believe the stories we tell about the future shape how we act in the present. And I want to help craft stories—and strategies—that honour those who come after us, while staying grounded in the realities we’re living through now.
This work doesn’t offer easy answers.

Breadcrumbs, Compost and Clues

Here, I’ll share some of my learning journey with future ancestors to record and acknowledge references and seed ideas for future collaborations.
Following is a list of trainings, information and references. it will become a mix of dedicated pages and paragraphs. When I get the content to satisfactory levels I’ll publish them. So expect this page to change a lot over the next few months. Depending on the page it may also be accompanied by a blog post or referenced in weekly notes.

• Tools for the Regenerative Renaissance 2021 published 10 June 2025
• Welsh Future Generation Act 2015 – this is linked to both my doughnut economics work I did a deep dive in 2022 and revisited in September 2024
• WEALL Creative Community 2023 and invitation to collaborate on film framed in 7 ancestor thinking, Seeding the future, a film by Dónal Ó Céilleachair 2023.
• Portraits of my future ancestors 2223
• Selfie 2050 is posted at the top of this page
• Good Life Ireland 2030 Research, Positive Disruptors and Thinkhouse.
• Joanna Macy, deep dive with Active Hope and the work that reconnects (WTR) 2024 – 2025
• Irelands 5th Province, as a future ancestor portal, experiments in time travel February 2025, this work is ongoing exploring myth, imagination and story within the Irish psyche
• How to fall in love with the future training with Rob Hopkins May 2025
• Town Anywhere with the Hare’s Corner Initiative and Ruth Ben-Tovim, Northern Ireland June 2025

In specific context of contemporary thinking about climate and social justice I’d mark 2021 as deepening of my engagment with future ancestors.
The idea of future ancestors, when I came into contact with it, was weird, inaccessible. It teased my brain, made it foggy. Curiosity led me on a path to be able to relate both forward and backwards in deep time. That work has reconnected me to more parts of myself – would I go as far as to say my work with future ancestors has regenerated my composted artist self?
Yes in June 2025, I would.

This is the story of my future ancestors and living with the question of “how do we create a future worth living into”.

I am editing this page post time travelling from 2030 with the Positive Futurist Network inaugural weekend at the Hawkins School for Future Thinking. The crew and the magician of longing Rob Hopkins explored How to fall in love with the future. The title of his new book. Those first trips can incur discombobulation, so as I integrate that experience I’ll write about it and add links here. I’ve done a light touch in Studio Notes Week 22.

Recently a friend who is also part of the IDEN crew let me know she’d attended an event as part of Belatine Celebrations in Tralee, May 2025 something on future ancestors, a snippet of a film was shown and there she says was ‘our Roisin’s voice’.
It’s not the first time I’ve said yes to something, not really knowing the ripples that move from it, from me, from the context. It makes me curious…
People seem genuinely interested in this, I have a sense of it as a very practical thing.

Our time here where I live is linear western thinking. So deeply embed through the place of my birth and education. Now I find it refreshing to think that we can create from the future rather than creating from our past.
What do you think?

If this is all new to you start here:

I began noticing a future ancestor theme also through

• deliberative democracy
• Welsh Future Generation Act and Future Generation Commissioner
• Rob Hopkins, What if book and podcast

The Japanese have specialist future ancestor ceremonial robes worn by people during citizen assemblies.
Future time travel and bending time open up our thinking, open up possibilities.

Lets get this published!
Let me know if you are curious about one of these pages over another, or if you have any questions.

_{Last updated 16 August 2025}