Degrowth & The Great Turning for People of Color

Event Overview

Degrowth: A Path to the Great Turning is a 9 week guided tour through an expanded Work That Reconnects spiral and a deep dive into the Degrowth sustainability science, policies and strategy. We’ll be combining the transformative ritualistic community practices from the Work That reconnects in an expanded 9 stage spiral that puts the bulk of the emphasis on action. This 9 stage spiral is based on Mutima Imani’s 7 stage spiral.

The course is 350 suggested donation but no one turned away for lack of funds.

This special course will be for people of color with a special emphasis on people of global majority in the global north and south orienting towards their own liberation.

Date & Time: 10:00am – 12:30 PST, 1:00 – 3:30 EST, 19h – 21:30 CET
June 20th, June 28th, July 4th, July 11th, July 18th, July 25th, August 1st, August 8th, August 15th.

Why a BIPOC Course?
The European Degrowth Scholarship is a largely European space as is the global community who has been stewarding Degrowth. The degrowth paradigm resonates fundamentally with demands from liberation movements throughout the centuries including from indigenous communities world wide to racialized communities in the western countries.

In this course we’ll create a brave space to adapt the analysis, demands and theories of change to our own needs. We’ll collectively answer the question how people of color / people of global majority need to adapt the degrowth frameworks from our own movement history and liberation needs.

The first half of the class will be bonding and deepening as a community through the Work That Reconnects. The second half of the class will be a technical deep dive into degrowth scholarship and the core concepts emerging form the European degrowth community. Each class will have a required reading which may include academic papers.

The course is designed two achieve two goals. The first goal is to resource participants for cultural change efforts. The second goal is to provide a transformative intro to the degrowth communities core contributions to the global discussion on how we fight for sustainability and justice and preserving a near 1.5C warming world through movement building. We’ll be rigorously working both the head and the heart.

Let’s learn a bit more about degrowth and the expanded 9 stage spiral.

Degrowth: “Degrowth refers to the planned and equitable downscaling of economic activities that are ecologically destructive and do not contribute to human well-being, to reduce ecological pressures and free up resources for decent living for all.” To achieve this the degrowth community has developed a policy package called the Post Growth deal that that could form the foundation of a new wave of progressive politics. In the course we’ll do a deep dive into this as well as the core components of the analytical frame that academic community has developed.

Expanded Work That Reconnects Spiral includes the follow stages:  Forming a Web of Gratitude, Self Awareness, Social Location & Getting to Know Each Other, Identifying Systems of Oppression & Liberation, Seeing with New & Ancient Eyes, Resituating in the movement & moment, Liberation Strategies, Getting Organized, & Envisioning Winning. These 9 stages are based on Mutima Imani’s 7 stage spiral but has a stronger emphasis on going forth. The lead facilitator has broken down the going forth stage into 4 parts to allow participants more time to develop an action plan.

Work That Reconnects education has historically been broad and general in terms of how to achieve the Great Turning. What this course hopes to provide is a technical articulation of the latest science on shifting out of the growth dependent economy and into a post growth economy. We’ll focus on the environmental science, the political proposals and work to develop a robust action plan as individuals and a community.

The Facilitators: Armando Davila Kirkwood & Arpita Bisht

Armando Davila-Kirkwood:

Committed to enviro-econo-eco-social justices, and an evolutionary moral breakthrough for humanity in the near term, Armando Davila Kirkwood lives at the intersection of justice, politics, culture, community & movement building using the tools of organizing, communications, facilitation, the arts (visual, music, poetry, dance) cultural programs, and networking to aim for the futures where humanity enacts a just transition to a regenerative economy.With over a decade of experience as an educator, environmental & climate justice activist in Northern California. Working in both startups, non-profits, founding organizations & campaigns Armando has been a dedicated worker in progressive movements and for just causes.Armando holds a Masters in Political Ecology, Degrowth & Environmental Justice from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Arpita Bisht:
Arpita Bisht is a Beatriu de Pinós PostDoctoral Fellow at the Institut de Ciècnia i Tecnologia Ambientals, Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain. Her research focuses on environmental injustices, social resistance movements, and ecological distribution conflicts around ecosystems and expanding mineral commodity frontiers, with a further focus on indigenous rights. She has worked on ecological conflicts, and ecological and human rights in India. Her research is interdisciplinary and lies at the intersection of political ecology, ecological economics, cultural and social anthropology, human geography, human ecology, conflict studies, natural resource management, policy studies and post-growth economics. She is particularly interested in developing viable post-growth and post-extractive solutions to achieve socio-ecologically viable economic progress in the global South.

For more information please check our course page!