Intergenerational dialogue holds particular significance in the current global context, as contemporary society continues to encounter obstacles that inhibit meaningful engagement with some of its most pressing challenges, including transgenerational trauma, structural injustice, gender inequality, limited youth engagement, and wider planetary concerns such as ecological degradation. In this paper that examines intergenerational dialogue within a participatory/post-materialist framework, we reflect on a dynamically unfolding intergenerational dialogue series that has emerged through the New Paradigm Navigators (NPN), a subgroup of the Scientific and Medical Network, an educational charity with a history spanning fifty years. The aim of this paper is to explore practice from inside this orientation. In that context, the first dialogue took place in April 2024, and a series of fourteen dialogues have since been convened, covering themes including leadership, ecology, gender, death, and work.
The project is grounded in a transformative learning context, with particular consideration to post-materialist approaches to knowledge and engagement that include the whole person – paying attention to how one is showing up in the relational space, both with and for others. This paper explores the project’s rationale and ethos, drawing on co-operative enquiry (Heron 1996) and the Heart Sense methodological framework (Livingstone 2019, 2021, 2025), situating this practice within a broader participatory epistemological paradigm (Walton 2022). We include reflections from Liam Bureau, the young person lead in this process, draw on participant contributions from the dialogue notes, and analyse the dialogues through the lens of Heron’s (1996) extended epistemology and Bohm dialogue theory (Bohm 1996; Isaacs 1999). The paper concludes with a reflection on the possibility of integrative learning for our times, suggesting that such dialogical practices may foster deeper connections between humans, the More-Than-Human world, and the Earth as a whole, and may offer a meaningful contribution to the challenges of multilateral governance and collective wellbeing.