Held annually in Athens, Roots Winter School (RWS) is a three-day progressive learning programme designed to cultivate hope, widen horizons, and catalyse action. RWS aims to push the boundaries of participants’ thinking, abilities, and imagination in order to foster global societies dedicated to planetary health and well-being. The program integrates critical theoretical thought with urgent political, socio-economic, ecological and cultural matters and experiences of struggles through a multifaceted methodology.
The methodology reflects the character of these sources of knowledge too: approaches coming from formal-education context (e.g. lecture, presentation, seminar) and non-formal processes of learning are mutually supportive. Our key objective is to amplify the program’s collective educational impact through encouraging co-learning experiences among the participants.
This Year’s Topic: Strategies for socio-ecological transformations in times of uncertainty
This year’s theme focuses on strategies for socio-ecological transformations in times of uncertainty, with a particular emphasis on socio-spatial justice. What are the relationships between global socio-spatial systems and local lived experiences? What is the role and implications of economic growth? How can we use the critical frame of degrowth to look through possibilities, policies and actions towards sustainable and equitable ecosystems that challenge mainstream perceptions of sustainability, including circular economy, smart cities, and green technological innovations? How intersectional, decolonial, and transfeminist processes can prioritise the needs of humans and beyond humans contributing to alternative socio-spatial visions across scales? What could be the diverse personal, collective, and institutional processes in such transformations?
While the limits and failures of our current economic and political system are known and repetitively pointed out by degrowth research, we have a deficit in the area of strategic planning for transformative politics. What is missing are entry points for politicizing and changing social values, norms and institutions. To do this successfully, it is useful to detect how hegemonic values are embed...
We are happy to announce a follow up to our roundtable about feminism(s) and degrowth at the Degrowth Conference in Budapest 2016. Sharing many common points, feminisms and degrowth have the potential to build an alliance which promotes mutual enrichment. One intersection is the criticism of the dominant socio-economic mode. By criticising the centrality of productive performance and by furt...
For our project “Degrowth from a future perspective”, we would like to present how Erik Assadourian, Senior Fellow at the World Watch Institute, envisions a Degrowth America in 2100 and looks back to the transiton towards a truly sustainable United States. Will this have become a place where we can still have personal (electric) vehicles, [...]
