Location: Jyväskylä, Finland
Dates: July 21st-28th, 2025
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
― Ruha Benjamin
How can we build community in the midst of collapse? What new socio-ecological structures of co-living can we create together, while also dismantling the fossil capitalist economy? In this summer study circle, we are calling for abstracts, papers, perspectives, statements of interest, essays, literary and artistic contributions on the topic of organizing and community building for post-growth communities. We welcome contributions from academics, artists, writers, NGOs, social movements, and anybody interested in participating. We are interested in discussing (past, present and future) ways of organizing together (through neighborhood associations, decentralized networks, social movements, and new urban or rural spaces) in ways that transcend the growth imperative, and help contribute to the end of fossil capitalism.
In the face of climate collapse, how are people organizing locally along degrowth principles of sufficiency and conviviality? What challenges do we face, and what tactics can we pursue in establishing ways of living that allow dismantling of harmful infrastructures and industries, acting and resisting that are not tied to fossil capital? How can we foster community wellbeing in the midst of collapse, while reducing and ultimately ending our dependencies on extractive industries? What connections can be built between (human and more-than-human) beings? What alliances can be made between academia and social movements? Between State, non-State and anti-State actors? What concrete initiatives already exist on the ground, combining community-building and resistance to capital? And how can we further foster “care in resistance”, while preserving connections between local peoples and their land?
We are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in ongoing projects and struggles in Nordic countries, including community resistance towards intensive forestry; volunteer forest conservation and peatland restoration; agroecology at high latitudes; chains of extractivism that start, end or run through Nordic countries; resistance against Nordic-based corporations that drive extractivism and exploitation in other parts of the world; Indigenous and local struggles of communities in the Nordic countries and the Arctic.
Suggested themes
Some suggested themes are below, but they are not exclusive, and we welcome other thematic contributions that do not fit any of the below:
- Paths towards degrowth community-building: critically studying instances of “nowtopias” in and beyond the Nordic countries; best practices, guidelines, strategies, tactics, success stories, challenges, obstacles, etc. Varieties, processes and examples of economic democracy and autonomous governance within degrowth communities.
- Convivial community-based leisure: reconceptualising touristic extractivism in light of climate collapse; exploring the slow violence of the tourism industry; transforming airports into natural recreation areas (e.g. Malmi in Finland); sufficiency and income degrowth as exnovation; reconceptualizing work and burn-out; approaches to tourism degrowth in the Arctic or other sparsely populated areas; the role of local heritage and traditions as an alternative to globalised tourism trends; approaches to de-touristification of local spaces; the role of proximity and community-based leisure time; envisioning post-growth futures in tourism with human and more-than-human storytelling and/or arts-based methods; relational and intergenerational approaches in community-based tourism; strategies towards collective appropriation, decommodification and downsizing of the tourism industry.
- Physical spaces for degrowth communities: De-urbanization, neo-urbanism and neo-ruralism; Small farm futures; Federated and decentralized governance; Horizontalism in urban planning; Municipal organizing and communalism; Depavement movements; Exnovation in urban and rural transport and provisioning systems; Indigenous bioregionalism.
- Communities of resistance against industrial forestry: Forest conservation as “defense of the commons”; Convivial vs. “fortress” conservation; Envisioning modes of forest conservation in line with “survival ecology”; Exnovation and termination of the forest industry; Building connections with the more-than-human world – how can the extractive and non-sustainable forestry industry be dismantled? What strategies and tactics can be pursued towards this goal, at various levels of actions and geographies? What concrete spaces have already been won from the forestry industry, and how are they evolving towards socio-ecological reconstruction? Lessons learnt from Indigenous resistance (e.g. Inari conflict)
- Movement-building to resist techno-capitalism: resistance to discourses, tactics and policies that drive extraction of natural resources (often from impoverished, Indigenous and/or Global South communities) for energy infrastructure and techno-gadget consumerism; unlearning high-tech and learning low-tech in educational institutions; efforts to dismantle surveillance and AI capitalism; critical perspectives on AI and digital colonialism; movements against extractivist metal-mining; critical investigation of chains of extractivism in the Nordic and Baltic countries; transnational movement-building; Examples from Sami resistance, Elokapina, and others.
