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
Gemüsekooperative Rote Beete [Vegetable Cooperative „Rote Beete“] from Marc Menningmann on Vimeo. What has agriculture to do with the climate? A lot. Modern, industrialized agriculture is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. This video shows an excursion which took place in the context of the Degrowth Conference in Leipzig last year. Participants visited the vegetable cooperative "Rote Beete" o...
By Inez Aponte Humans are storytelling beings. In fact one could argue that it is impossible to make sense of the world without story. Storytelling is how we piece together facts, beliefs, feelings and history to form something of a coherent whole connecting us to our individual and collective past, present and future. The stories that help make meaning of our lives inform how we shape and re-...
This article is written by Claudia Gómez-Portugal in the scope of the Stream towards Degrowth. As a Mexican activist and promoter of social change she founded the organization SAKBE – Commons for Social Change and the Free Learning Communities for Life Initiative – and commits herself to developing communication strategies for social change, effective participation, [...]
