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?
Reflections on organising next year's degrowth conference, which will explore strategies for social and ecological transformation. I headed to Barcelona last year with a friend to attend the two week degrowth summer school, a rite of passage in the degrowth community. It takes place at the intellectual center of degrowth, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and at a degrowt...
Degrowth poses a fundamental challenge to a Labour Party that has yet to decide how far it wishes to transcend – and not merely reform – a growth- oriented, capitalist political economy. The British Labour Party has seen a resurgence of radicalism since the 2007-8 financial crash. With the collapse of the authority of neoliberalism, a space has opened for alternative ideologies, theories and...
At the COP24 conference in Poland, countries are aiming to finalise the implementation plan for the 2015 Paris Agreement. The task has extra gravity in the wake of the recent IPCC report declaring that we have just 12 years to take the action needed to limit global warming to that infamous 1.5ᵒC target. Although the conference itself is open to selected state representatives only, many see t...
