Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

This panel will bring together contributions from Ecofeminism, Feminist mutual support groups and Community Accountability experiences to illustrate some of the challenges and opportunities for practising convivial ways of living and relating in the context of gender based violence and ecological crisis.
Starting from the concept of “conviviality”, as “the creative relationships that emerge between people and their material surroundings, sustained by grassroots trust and responsibility” (Montgomery and bergman, 2017), the discussion panel will explore questions of alternative forms of relating in the web of life - in dialogue with eco-feminist voices - and questions of “trust” and “responsibility”, coming from the experience of mutual support groups and community accountability.

There are many systemic obstacles to practising conviviality which Degrowth, Ecologist and Feminist movements, among many others, have amply identified: the dispossession caused by colonial and patriarchal extractivism, as well as the gender based, racist, and ableist violence which create fractures in communities which are very hard to heal.
In response to this, conviviality is what increases autonomy and freedom from capitalism’s precarious systems of provision. Both the eco-feminist and the community accountability movements give us an insight into how autonomy is built in the here and now. By stirring away from offering universal solutions, and by sharing an understanding of context-bound and locally routed knowledge, they inform different understandings of what conviviality may look like, both in terms of our relationship with the non-human world and with each other.

Montgomery N., bergman c. (2017) Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, AK Press.

Info

Day: 2023-09-01
Start time: 16:30
Duration: 01:30
Room: ZV-8-6
Type: Non-academic Session
Theme: Feminist, decolonial, anti-racist and anti-ableist ecologies

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