Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

While recent publications have put in the centre of degrowth discussions the issue of strategy, the formation of collective actors/agents of transformation that will implement such a strategy has not been elaborated in detail. This presentation aims to provide some insights by creating an unfinished and open-ended collage, that may enable such an elaboration, while at the same time provide some real-life experimentations based on an ongoing action research in Thessaloniki, Greece. A starting point for this collage would be the challenges for the construction of collective actors that may work towards desirable, viable and achievable destinations, which were identified by Erik Olin Wright. However, these destinations should not be predetermined. In contrast, the paths towards them may be speculative (in the sense of creating themselves the pluriverse), autonomous (following Dinerstein’s definition of autonomy as the art of organizing hope), complex, diverse, and even contradicting. Following such lines of though, hegemony, a potential answer to the creation of collective actors, may now be portrayed as a decentralized system. This system could have diverse nodal points with each of them having contingent articulation both in itself and with other nodal points. Therefore, new hegemonic formations starting from the local level, that embrace social contingency, creative social praxis, and systemic complexity, can either be inspired by or be compatible with degrowth values and discourses, and can also co-construct, co-produce and co-evaluate relevant transformative public policies. At the last part of the presentation, a brief illustration of the above will be attempted based on the aforementioned ongoing action research.

Info

Day: 2023-09-01
Start time: 12:30
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-8-9
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Resilience building through degrowth

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