We’re excited to share that our research group has just published its first paper, “The Legacy Maker Scenario: From Private Towards Collective Legacy-Making”, in the journal Possibility Studies & Society. It’s free to read online, and it marks a big moment for us, bringing together many conversations and ideas we’ve been exploring as a team.
What Is a Legacy and Why Should We Rethink It?
Our paper and project start with a simple but powerful question: What do we leave behind? This question matters more than ever, especially as we face growing inequalities and environmental damage. These two challenges are deeply connected, and we believe the idea of “legacy” can help us understand and respond to them.
We define legacy not just as something passed down, like money or property, but as dynamic, future-oriented processes that span co-existing more-than-human generations and extend to future ones.
Introducing the “Legacy Maker”
Right now, wealth and power are becoming more concentrated, while the planet’s ecosystems are under severe stress. Our paper introduces the idea of the “legacy maker” to think about how we can shift from personal, family-based legacies to something collective and future-focused.
Instead of just leaving behind material things, the “legacy maker” encourages us to think about how we can mend what has been damaged and build conditions for a more liveable and fairer future for all.
A New Way to Think About the Future
We often hear about “long-term thinking” in business or tech. But the Legacy Maker idea goes further. It’s about shared responsibility and imagining a future where we consider humans and non-humans as intertwined in more-than-human relations. It asks us to recognise past harms and work toward repair and justice.
This paper is just the beginning. We know there’s more work to do, especially in understanding how power, inequality, and local contexts shape legacies. In future research, we’ll explore these issues and look at how the idea of legacy plays out in real-life situations.