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
This year we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the first international degrowth conference in Paris, 18-19 April 2008. This event introduced the originally French activist slogan décroissance into the English-speaking world and international academia as degrowth. This year we celebrate with three conferences: the current one in Malmö, the one in Mexico City from 3 to 7 September and at the Post...
When it comes to technological development, I often hear the words: What can be done will be done – sooner or later. Many people think that technological development follows a path directed by quasi-natural laws that head into one and only one direction – called “progress” – which is: to use more technology, more complex technology, more expensive technology, more powerful technology. Now, if t...
By Jeremy Cardonna et al, originally published by the Resilience Blog A group known as the “ecomodernists,” which includes prominent environmental thinkers and development specialists such as Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Stewart Brand, David Keith, and Joyashree Roy has recently published a statement of principles called An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015). Many of the authors of the Ma...
