WHEN
August 24th - 28th
WHERE
Gars am Kamp, Lower Austria
WHY
We want to go beyond the tendency of classical education to focus on the mind and create opportunities where participants can not only acquire knowledge, but also become passionate and active advocates for socio-ecological change. The festival is a place where learning with all the senses and creating something new are at the centre, alongside mind-focused academic discussions. Thematically, the core is about future and community building and equitable development. The aim of the festival is to inspire people to work together critically, politically and creatively for a just socio-ecological change for a good life for all people and living beings.
WHAT
Participants are invited to shape the festival and not just be passive consumers of another cultural event. In the field of embodied learning, we offer not only intellectual learning experiences, but those that involve the body, the emotions and their social conditioning. To meet the challenges ahead, we need empowered individuals and collectives to initiate change. In the afternoons, there will be Open Spaces where participants become co-creators of the festival, generating emotional, embodied and/or cognitive knowledge, workshops and discussions where we can inspire each other, be inspired, teach and learn, collaborate and be motivated to take action.
WHO
We became a team while organising last year's degrowth summer school in Barcelona. It was nice pushing a lot of content into our brains, and participating in many workshops presented by inspiring activist-academics and artists. But then we asked ourselves: what would happen if we left more space, time and energy for sharing inspirations, skills and knowledge amongst us? For really getting to know each other? We are on a collective investigation: how to create a celebratory space for conviviality and co-creation for the degrowth movement and beyond?
Find more info and book your ticket altshiftfestival.org
Local action is often the best remedy for the failings of the current system — a worldwide confederation of democratic communities can have the same impact at a global scale. Today we are seeing an inspiring resurgence of progressive action at the local level, even as reactionary nationalist movements in Europe and beyond seek to position themselves as the true voices of a renewed localism. ...
… and the contribution of the "Degrowth in Action – Climate Justice Summer School 2015" By Elena Hofferberth With the 21st Conference of the Parties taking place at the end of this year, the United Nations climate process is heading towards another climax. The aim is nothing less than the adoption of an international legally binding agreement limiting atmospheric warming to a maximum of 2 deg...
By Filka Sekulova and Francois Schneider One might say that the term degrowth provides few new insights. At first sight the concept seems identical with the calls of the Radical Ecology Movement from the Seventies, supplanted by the Meadows report to the Club of Rome on ‘The limits to growth’. Yet, unlike terms such as [...]
