Past Events at Kairos
Tuesday April 14th 2026
Screening of “Our Land” with Nadia Shaikh & Orban Wallace
Documentary “Our Land” (1hr 30mins) spotlights those fighting for greater public access to the English countryside. It follows the Right to Roam movement as it embarks on mass trespass, campaigning and education, frequently finding itself in conflict with England’s landowners.
The film focuses on land justice campaigner and co-director of the Right to Roam campaign Nadia Shaikh, Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass, and Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England? and The Lie of the Land — as well as landowners from Cornwall to Scotland who see themselves as long-term custodians of the countryside.
With an introduction to the history of the land justice debate by nature writer Robert Macfarlane, “Our Land” examines access, custodianship, and conservation, challenging age-old beliefs about property that have shaped relationships with the land for over a thousand years. The film also brings to light barriers to connection to the countryside for people of colour, featuring groups that promote access to nature for Global Majority and refugee communities.
The screening was followed by supper and discussion led by Nadia Shaikh, co-director of the Right to Roam campaign and the film’s director Orban Wallace. With 50% of the English countryside owned by just 1% of the population, we talked about rights of access and how we might radically rethink ownership and guardianship of all the nation’s land.
The evening included a break for a one-pot vegan supper that we ate together.
Friday April 10th 2026
Friday Night Music with Jessie Maryon Davies
Jessie Maryon Davies performed a playful set of original and self-deprecating songs including “Splashing the Patriarchy” and a “Lament for a Squashed Snail”. She drew upon her years of experience as a choral leader, musical director and community energiser. Following her performance, there was a chance to take part in writing a new song that challenged our self-esteem and deepened our collective creativity.
Friday Night Music is our series of relaxed drinks evenings featuring a short musical set followed by food and socialising.
Tuesday April 7th 2026
What Drives Climate Action? with Kris de Meyer
Knowledge, awareness, ‘believing in climate change’, worry, concern and anxiety: Just a few of the things that are thought to be necessary or useful conditions to lead to climate action. But what if this is wrong?
Neuroscientist Kris de Meyer is Director of the Climate Action Unit at University College London where he uses insights from neuroscience and psychology to change how we think, talk about and act on climate change.
In this talk, followed by plenty of time for discussion, he used neuroscience to explain why knowledge doesn’t necessarily translate into action, why fear can have unwanted effects and what we all can do to remain focused and active.
The evening included a break for a one-pot vegan supper.
Thursday April 2nd 2026
Animals & Us: An Evening of Shared Readings
For the latest in our series of reading evenings, we shared excerpts from books, essays, poems and other texts that explored new ways of understanding and relating to our animal kin. How can we humans restore our relationship with the rest of the natural world?
All were invited to bring a text to read. We discussed the ideas raised after each reading, which included passages from Becoming Animal by David Abram, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and the poem Snake by DH Lawrence.
Wednesday April 1st 2026
Monthly Drinks & Ping-Pong League Launch
Our monthly mid-week bar night takes place on the first Wednesday of every month. At April’s mid-week drinks we launched the new Kairos Ping-Pong League.
Entry to mid-week drinks free, with a pay bar serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks as well as vegan food. Kairos regulars, new-comers, those with a group or on their own, or anyone wanting a quiet catch up with a friend, all are welcome to our drinks nights.
Tuesday March 31st 2026
Screening of “Yintah” with Hugh Brody
Yintah (2024, 1hr 50 mins) – meaning “land” – is a feature length documentary about Wet’suwet’en resistance to Canadian colonialism and the Coastal GasLink pipeline.
Directed by Jennifer Wickham, Brenda Michell and Michael Toledano, and drawing on more than a decade of verité footage, the film shadows two Wet’suwet’en leaders (Freda Huson and Molly Wickham) as they protect their ancestral lands from fossil fuel companies and resist state violence.
Wet’suwet’en land is unceded: There is no treaty or bill of sale. In 1997, the Dinï ze’ and Tsakë ze’ (Hereditary Chiefs) of the Wet’suwet’en people proved in Canada’s top court that they had never given up ownership to 22,000km2 of land.
Yet, despite this court ruling, Canada authorised fossil fuel majors to build pipelines across Wet’suwet’en land. The result: a decade long clash between Wet’suwet’en land defenders and Canadian police seeking to seize Wet’suwet’en land at gunpoint. Freda, Molly, and the Dinï ze’ and Tsakë ze’ are part of a centuries-long fight to protect their children, culture, and land from colonial violence. For the Wet’suwet’en, their very future is at stake.
After the screening, anthropologist Hugh Brody, who has worked in Wetsuwet’en territory, offered some anthropological context and led a group discussion. Hugh gave a talk at Kairos in December 2024, “Keeping the World Intact”, about the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and sub-Arctic.
Friday March 27th 2026
Friday Night Ceilidh with Ewan King & the Heath Street Irregulars
We swung, spun, and stomped our way through a joyful evening of Ceilidh dancing with Ewan King and the Heath Street Irregulars, a local band accompanied by caller Jo Bowis.
Jo and the Irregulars guided us through lively traditional sets and taught us a range of dances. From seasoned ceilidh enthusiasts to complete beginners, Jo made everyone feel welcome and confident as the night unfolded.
Wednesday March 25th 2026
Book Club: “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…” by David Graeber
For our March Book Club, we read “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…” a posthumously published collection of essays by David Graeber.
Publisher’s description: “‘The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently,” wrote David Graeber, as well-known for his sharp, lively essays as he was for his iconic role in the Occupy movement and his paradigm-shifting tomes.
There are converging political, economic, and ecological crises, and yet our politics is dominated by either business as usual or nostalgia for a mythical past. Thinking against the grain, Graeber was one of the few who dared to imagine a new understanding of the past and a liberatory vision of the future — to imagine a social order based on humans’ fundamental freedom. In essays published over three decades and ranging across the biggest issues of our time — inequality, technology, the identity of ‘the West,’ democracy, art, power, anger, mutual aid, and protest — he challenges the old assumptions about political life. A trenchant critic of the order of things, and driven by a bold imagination and a passionate commitment to human freedom, he offers hope that our world can be different.
During a moment of daunting upheaval and pervasive despair, the incisive, entertaining, and urgent essays collected in “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .”, edited and with an introduction by Nika Dubrovsky and with a foreword by Rebecca Solnit, make for essential and inspiring reading. They are a profound reminder of Graeber’s enduring significance as an iconic, playful, necessary thinker.”
Thursday March 19th 2026
Feminism & Non-Dualism with Minna Salami
Across many contemplative traditions, non-duality names a way of understanding the world that refuses the fiction of separation. It reminds us that self and world, inner life and social reality, mind and body are not oppositional but deeply entangled.
Less often recognised is that non-dualism is also a key idea in the feminist tradition. Feminist traditions have long challenged the hierarchical binaries that underpin power: male and female, reason and emotion, culture and nature, human and non-human. These divisions are not neutral. They are historical narratives that justify hierarchy, violence and exclusion. From a feminist perspective, non-dualism becomes a framework for truth, relationality and attention to lived experience.
The urgency of this perspective is clear in the present moment. We are living through overlapping crises that can feel relentless: the return of authoritarian politics, mass violence, public reckonings with hidden systems of sexual power and impunity, alongside ecological emergency. These issues are connected by a worldview that fragments reality and separates us from the world we inhabit.
In this talk, Minna Salami – a Nigerian, Finnish, and Swedish thinker, author of “Can Feminism Be African?” and the Substack Kaleido: The Europatriarchy Files – brought together the political and spiritual meanings of non-duality by exploring what happens when we observe that politics and spirituality are also not separate.
Drawing on feminist philosophy and contemplative insights as well as contemporary political and cultural examples, she argued that moving beyond either/or thinking is not a retreat from politics but a deepening of it: a shift toward relational power, epistemic clarity and more integrated ways of knowing, living and acting in a time of profound uncertainty and crisis.
Friday March 13th 2026
Friday Night Music: Rosa Luxemburg & I
We held an evening of performance and song with writer and actor Amanda Douge. Her literary performance “Rosa Luxemburg and I” aims to release the radical, ecological imagination towards new, revolutionary ways of being.
In this piece, historical figure and socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg became a conduit for reflection on earth systems damage, the capitalist status quo and eco-socialist potentials. The performance asked: can our individual “I” find its way to climate revolution and solidarity?
For her Kairos performance Amanda was joined by classical singer Amy Kearsley who performed works by Polish and German composers of the romantic period, including settings of Rosa’s favoured poets Goethe and Adam Mickiewicz.
Thursday March 12th 2026
Reviving the Ancient Memory Arts: An Act of Resistance with Eleanor Robins
In the modern age, it’s easy, and can seem harmless, to outsource memory to databases, photography, AI, and even tech as simple as books and the written word. But the pre-moderns knew that memory is far more than just a mechanical function. They understood it as the source of creativity and imagination, a vital way of relating to land, a living repository of ancestral wisdom, and more.
In this talk, writer and independent scholar Eleanor Robins offered a fresh and urgent picture of what we’ve lost by forgetting our memories, suggesting that rediscovering memory practices is a powerful form of resistance in the current paradigm shift. We then put these ideas into practice and collectively memorised a short poem.
Eleanor previously spoke at Kairos in November 2024 on “A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal”.
Tuesday March 10th 2026
Derailment Risk: A Climate Blind Spot with Laurie Laybourn
As the world heads deeper into the new climate reality, how will we maintain our ability to act?
It’s often assumed that our agency will only grow as climate impacts escalate: That as climate consequences worsen, they will serve as a series of “wake up calls” that reinforce climate action.
But the opposite can also happen. This is called Derailment Risk – the risk that climate consequences instead undermine climate action, derailing the world from pathways towards the least worst outcomes.
Laurie Laybourn is Executive Director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, a think-do tank focused on the new climate reality, and a fellow at both Chatham House and the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter.
In this talk, followed by plenty of time for discussion, Laurie shared his research into Derailment Risk and suggested ways that we might act to prevent it.
Tuesday March 3rd 2026
Open Projects Night
We held our regular open mic night, where we learnt about each other’s projects, built connections and offered each other support. The evening included a series of five minute presentations with an additional ten minutes for questions, discussion and offers of support. The presentations were followed by informal discussion over a one-pot vegan supper that we ate together.
Presentations included:
- Yuxin Jiang with “Commoning as Organising”, a publication that aims to help grassroots movements and community organisers move away from defensive battles and towards proactive, community-led alternatives to the status quo.
- Sukhin Tye with Chinese-British Seedlings, an Sino-British exchange programme focused on visits to eco-farms, villages, and biodynamic farms, that aims to create deeper, heart-felt interconnectedness in humanity, beyond ideology.
- Joe Redston with Metacrisis Diplomats, a way for people to come together to talk, think, feel, and learn about the metacrisis.
- Jonathan Pritchard with voting platform So Vote.
- Guy Morris and Marie Geneste with Empowering a Citizen Panel to Co-Create the UK’s Climate Future, an interface to help participants in a citizen assembly understand the detail, nuances and trade-offs involved in making decisions about climate policy, enabling them to make informed, resilient recommendations that are more likely to be taken forward.
- Steve Brett with Community of Communities, a project to break down the siloes between “social/ political/eco activism” and “inner spiritual” development communities. Both are needed for a paradigm shift – in a collaboration that doesn’t erase difference.
- Patricia Imbarus with the Ethical Assembly, an independent international summit at the intersection of climate, social justice and human rights.
Open Projects Night is for: Anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.
Friday February 27th 2026
Friday Night Music with Klezmer Foygl
Klezmer Foygl is a new ensemble playing both traditional and original Klezmer repertoire. Led by Clarinettist John Macnaughton, the group is rooted in traditional Yiddish music, while adding an innovative, contemporary London twist to its sound. John was joined by Josh Middleton on accordion and Theo Malka-Wishart on double bass.
The band played a 40 minute set, followed by a break for supper, after which a caller led us through a number of traditional Klezmer dance routines.
Wednesday February 25th 2026
Book Club: “The Landscape of Utopia” by Tim Waterman
For our February Book Club, we read “The Landscape of Utopia” by Tim Waterman, a collection of short interludes, think pieces, and critical essays on landscape, utopia, philosophy, culture and food.
Publishers description: “Exploring power and democracy, and their shaping of public space and public life, taste, etiquette, belief and ritual, and foodways in community and civic life, the book provides a much-needed critical approach to landscape imaginaries. It discusses landscape in its broadest sense, as a descriptor of the relationship between people and place that occurs everywhere on land, from cities to countryside, suburb to wilderness.
With over fifty black and white illustrations interspersing the twenty-six chapters, this is a book to dive into and spark discussion on new modes of thinking in the wake of unfolding global crises.”
Tim Waterman will be the principle speaker at our Spring Residency: Reworlding at Selgars Mill, Devon between Wednesday April 29th and Tuesday May 5th. He is Professor of Landscape Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He gave a talk at Kairos in July 2024, “Planetarity: Some Tools for Thinking About the Earth”, and took part in our Colin Ward Festival last September.
Tuesday February 24th 2026
Screening of “The Trial of the Chicago 7” with Awol Allo
The Trial of the Chicago 7, directed by Aaron Sorkin (2020, 2hr 9min) tells the story of a group of radicals accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The trial that resulted stands as one of the most memorable and unusual courtroom spectacles in American history.
Politically and culturally, 1968 was a year of unprecedented radicalism and revolutionary agitation in a decade of significant turbulence that saw the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the abdication of Lindon B Johnson. The Vietnam war became the longest war in the US history; American casualties passed the 30,000 mark. When the Viet Cong mounted their Tet offensive, anti-war protests grew larger and louder on college campuses. Black Nationalists movements such as the Black Panther Party were already organising and protesting police brutality and systemic racism.
The Chicago conspiracy trial is a culmination of these developments. The defendants transformed the courtroom into a political stage, using the devices of law and justice to counter the charge of conspiracy with theatrical defiance, aiming to put the state itself on trial for the “absurdity” of prosecuting dissent against the Vietnam War, systemic racism, and economic inequality. The courtroom spectacle crystallised the 1960s radical spirit, and brought about a rupture, putting the American body politic in contradiction with its professed values and ideals.
There are significant parallels between that period and the recent decade, particularly the targeting of various movements supporting Palestine liberation. The proscription of Palestine Action recently and the Defend Our Juries protests and prosecutions carry resemblances with the radicalism and defiance that characterised the 1960s.
Following the screening, Awol Allo, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Sheffield led a discussion on the parallels between these two moments, and on the appropriation of the legal system as a site of struggle against the state.
Saturday February 21st 2026
Thrutopian Living with Manda Scott
How can we craft the stories that we can live by in the future, and that we’ll be proud to leave behind?
We’re at a crossroads. With every day that passes, our choices become starker: do we give everything we’ve got to a future in which all of humanity flourishes in co-creation with the web of life? Or do we accelerate the rush to species-level extinction?
While this is the question of our times, we don’t always have the stories that will offer us the keys to get there. Our Dystopias are being lived in real time and the downward trajectory is all too obvious. Utopias feel like a distant fantasy, becoming less real by the day. And yet we are a storied species: everything we do arises from the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other. If we can fashion the stories of a way through to the flourishing future our hearts know is possible, then we can get there.
Manda Scott, author of the “Boudica: Dreaming” series and host of the Accidental Gods podcast and the Thrutopia Masterclass, believes that 2026 is the pivotal year of our epoch – this is when we can shift away from the death cult of predatory capitalism and towards the Thrutopian future that is our birthright.
In this special afternoon-long workshop, Manda joined us via video link to explore the inner evolution that can help us reach towards new, Thrutopian ways of being. She outlined the ideas, then led us in a journey through time and space to enable us to connect with the wisdom of future generations. She explored how we might find the agency in our own lives to build “MADE” futures – underpinned by Motivation (I yearn for a future I can see and believe in); Agency (I have the tools to change my inner and outer worlds); Direction (I can see both the next best step and the light at the end of the tunnel) and Empowerment (I am free enough of the old system’s shackles to take the steps I need).
Thursday February 19th 2026
UBI: From Distant Ideal to Transformative Policy with Kate Pickett
In a future shaped by rapid AI-driven changes to the labour market and intensifying climate risks, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an essential structural reform, not a welfare tweak. As work and communities are transformed, UBI could provide a secure, unconditional income, buffering households against upheaval, enhancing social cohesion and sustaining purposeful human activity.
In this talk, Kate Pickett – epidemiologist, Director of the Born in Bradford Centre for Social Change at the University of York, author of “The Good Society” and co-author of “Basic Income” – outlined how UBI can protect health, education and opportunity in the face of the systemic shocks that are on the way.
She showed how UBI can act as a shield against poverty-related stress, a key determinant of health and inequality: A predictable income supports preventive care, stable housing and continuous learning, and mitigates the health and educational disparities exposed by volatile labour markets and climate events. The policy is particularly protective for vulnerable groups – women, disabled people, migrants and youth – who are most at risk when shocks hit.
Kate explored the crucial design choices behind any UBI scheme. How much do people get, who is eligible and how do we administer and fund it? How can we develop feasible and acceptable processes and design elements and fund them through progressive taxation and public investment?
UBI is a potential lever to reduce inequality, improve health outcomes, and strengthen democratic legitimacy by decreasing precarity and increasing participation in civic life. Kate invited us to join a collective ambition – grounded in evidence, tested through pilots and scalable to diverse contexts – to move a universal basic income from a distant ideal to a practical, transformative policy.
Tuesday February 17th 2026
Thrutopia: Stories of Active Hope
With the prospect of civilisation collapse looking ever more likely, Utopian visions of any sort now appear beyond our reach. And yet the opposite, the bleak futures set out in so many Dystopia warnings, is not inevitable.
Instead, we need to look beyond the Utopia-Dystopia binary and find another way to imagine the future. The concept of Thrutopia offers such a way. Literary works like Manda Scott’s “Boudica: Dreaming”, Stephen Markley’s climate epic “The Deluge”, and Megan Hunter’s “The End We Start From”, recently adapted for the cinema, have pioneered the way.
Through a series of short talks and readings, followed by plenty of time for discussion, we explored the concept of Thrutopia with philosopher and activist Rupert Read, novelist Monique Roffey and fiction writer for children and young adults, Laura Baggaley.
Rupert argued that neither Utopian dreams nor Dystopian warnings are much help to us now. He explained how Thrutopia, a concept he developed in 2017 influenced by Ursula K Le Guin, is needed instead. Thrutopia, he argued, is our best-case North Star for a collapse-aware, reality-based future.
Monique discussed, and for the first time read publicly from, “Gen Dragonfly”, the Thrutopian novel she’s currently writing. Set in Sussex in 2055 after the collapse of many of our current systems, it focuses on how we “get through” a full-blown poly-crisis thirty years from now. While life is tough, 2055 is also a time of “active hope”, miracles, alien disclosure, poetry and druidry, when love will be discovered as valuable – as an unforeseen, reliable system or currency.
Laura, whose most recent book is an eco-romance called “Dirt”, talked about how fiction can change the stories that society tells itself, exploring the particular challenge of writing Thrutopias for young readers.
Friday February 13th 2026
Friday Night Music with Talulah
Welsh musician Talulah creates bilingual blends of acoustic and electronic sound to explore her native identity. She is part of the new wave of artists emerging from Wales.
For her Kairos set, Talulah sang, combining her mix of ethereal neo-soul, folk and jazz with story-telling and insights from her research into Welsh minority language revival. She was accompanied by percussionist Wynn Tasker and Judah Daniels on piano.
Friday Night Music is our fortnightly series of relaxed drinks evenings featuring a short musical set followed by food and socialising.
Thursday February 5th 2026
Alternative Economies: An Evening of Shared Readings
For the latest in our series of reading evenings, we shared excerpts from texts exploring alternative economies. All were invited to propose a short reading – either on the care economy, the barter economy, mutual aid, the relational as opposed to the transactional, Degrowth, Donut Economics, or other ways we might organise ourselves outside of capitalism. We welcomed human stories (fictional and factual) as much as economic theories.
Readings included passages from “Vulture Capitalism” by Grace Blakeley, “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde and “Debt” by David Graeber.
Other suggestions for readings from our librarian and others included: “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Caliban and the Witch” by Silvia Federici, “Small is Beautiful” by EF Schumacher, “Less is More” by Jason Hickel, “The Care Economy” by Tim Jackson, “Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons” by David Bollier, “Pandemic Solidarity” by Marina Sitrin et al and “Mutual Aid” by Peter Kropotkin, all of which are in the Kairos library collection.
Wednesday February 4th 2026
Monthly Mid-Week Drinks
Our new monthly mid-week bar night takes place on the first Wednesday of every month. Entry is free, with a pay bar serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks as well as vegan food. Kairos regulars, new-comers, those with a group or on their own, or anyone wanting a quiet catch up with a friend, all are welcome to our drinks nights.
The next monthly mid-week drinks will be on Wednesday March 4th.
Friday January 30th 2026
Friday Night Music with Born to Bossa
The second of our Friday Music Nights featured the Brazilian sounds and rhythms of Born to Bossa. The group performed a relaxed set of Bossa Nova songs, followed by a short percussion workshop, a break for supper and a free-form jam session.
Born To Bossa, a London-based Brazilian music project led by guitarist, vocalist and musical director Dave Holmes, takes classic bossa nova and brings it up to date. Drawing on Dave’s experience performing across both Europe and Brazil, the group has a rich repertoire of classic bossa nova alongside carefully reworked English-language songs and original material.
Dave was joined by soul, jazz, funk and blues singer Carole Therese Beausaint. Carole, who was raised in North London, has been shaped both by her Dominican heritage and by years performing in Amsterdam’s diverse music scene.
Wednesday January 28th 2026
Book Club: “Birnam Wood” by Eleanor Catton
For our January Book Club we read Eleanor Catton’s 2023 novel “Birnam Wood”.
Publishers description: “A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike, leaving a sizeable farm abandoned. This land offers an opportunity to Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. But they hadn’t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who also has an interest in the place. Can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?
A gripping literary thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character. It is a brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions, and consequences, and an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.”
Thursday January 22nd 2026
New Possibilities in Science with Rupert Sheldrake
Many scientists believe that science already understands the nature of reality, in principle; the fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in.
The impressive achievements of science and technology seem to support this attitude. But recent research has revealed unexpected problems at the heart of physics, cosmology, biology, medicine and psychology. The sciences are being constricted by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas.
In the skeptical spirit of true scientific inquiry, Rupert Sheldrake turns the fundamental dogmas of science into questions, opening up startling new possibilities. Rupert is a biologist, the author of The Science Delusion (among other books and scientific publications), a fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, California and the Temenos Academy, London, and formerly Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project for research on unexplained human abilities.
In this talk, he explored some of those possibilities: The universe may be more like a living organism than a machine. The total amount of matter and energy may be increasing. Consciousness may be widespread in nature. Children may inherit characteristics acquired by their parents. Memories may not be stored in brains, and minds may extend beyond heads.
His talk was followed by a one-pot vegan supper and discussion.
Tuesday January 13th 2026
Real Philosophy: Overcoming the Divide Between Thought & Action with Christoph Schuringa
Philosophy was, for much of its history, synonymous with the rational investigation of the nature of the world and of how to live. As such, its defining characteristics were its complete generality, and its pursuit of vital human concerns.
Today, philosophy has been reduced to a specialised discipline and its role has become unclear. It used to be thought that philosophy could have the special task of clarifying what is said in other disciplines, or providing a foundation for those disciplines, but no one seriously believes in such justifications for its existence any longer.
In this talk, Christoph Schuringa advocated for the revival of an ancient conception of philosophy – one that gives philosophy the scope of rational enquiry – as put through a radical transformation by Karl Marx. Philosophy, as Marx argued, does not stand apart from the world. It is our human living thinking in action.
Recovering this idea, Christoph claimed, has profound implications for human action and activism today. Rather than relegating the role of philosophy to the working out of theories that then await ‘application’ to the ‘real’ world, to do philosophy is to actualise the power of thinking that we all possess as humans acting in the world. Our embrace of ‘real philosophy’ in turn brings the complex challenges of today’s world, in particular the crises of capital and climate, into the heart of philosophy.
Christoph is a philosopher and author of A Social History of Analytic Philosophy and Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy.
His talk was followed by a one-pot vegan supper and discussion.
Friday January 9th 2026
Friday Night Music with Kareem Samara
The first of our new Friday Music Nights featured oud player Kareem Samara. Kareem performed a half hour set at 7.45pm, after which we served a vegan one pot supper at the bar. The bar then stayed open for drinks until 11pm. Entry was free after 8.30pm for anyone who just wanted to come for a supper or a drink.
Kareem combines the Oud and Arabic percussion with loopers and samplers “to create a dialogue between himself and technology, traditions and the future. He pushes the limits of what is expected of an instrument weighed down by generations of expectation, exploring every inch of the Oud to create a modern soundworld, where archival interviews and field recordings connect struggles and timelines, interweaving melodies that strive to be free of borders.”
Kareem has performed and collaborated with artists including Nadah El Shazly, Ayman Asfour, Goat Girl, Ryan Harvey, Tom Morello, Tashi Dorji, Kinn, Matt Cargill, Fatima Laham and Bint Mbareh. He most recently composed the music for Radio 4s “The Yaffa Cherry Orchard”.
Tickets were half price for Kairos Community Members. Community Membership is automatic and free for anyone who has attended at least three talk or discussion events, at least one of those in the last nine months.
Tuesday January 6th 2026
Open Projects Night
We held our regular open mike night, where we learnt about each other’s projects, built connections and offered each other support. The evening included a series of five minute presentations with an additional ten minutes for questions, discussion and offers of support. The presentations were followed by informal discussion over a one-pot vegan supper that we ate together.
Presentations included:
- Anouchka Grose with “Cultural Deconditioning and Somatic Activism”.
- Claire Loussouarn with “Moving with the Land”, how movement can help us connect to the land, even in urban environments.
- Paul Powlesland with “River Guardianship”.
- Victoria Thiele with a project to create a platform to connect financial journalists with people working for urgent causes
- Ros Kane with “Before Becoming a Parent”, a project to teach good parenting to children in schools in order to create a more caring, safer society.
It was our best attended Open Projects Night yet.
Open Projects Night is for: Anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.
Everyone is welcome to attend. If you’d like to present, the next opportunity will be on Tuesday March 3rd. Email events@kairos.london with the name and a short description of your project. If you’d like to just come and listen you are also most welcome.
Saturday December 20th 2025
Winter Solstice Celebration
Our Winter Solstice Celebration is now a regular fixture on the Kairos calendar. We marked the passing of the longest night with fortune-telling by Kairos’s own Sibyl of Cumae, vegan supper, cocktails from the pay bar, a short musical set from To The Garden, DJ United Nations, and a late licence until 1am.
On the Winter Solstice, our Sibyl can be found in her cave at Kairos. Pay her a visit and ask her your fate and she will write her answer on a leaf and place it in a pile at the front of the cave. It’s very likely though, that before you can read it, a wind will come and blow the leaves around and you will never know if you’ve learnt your own fate or someone else’s.
To The Garden is duo Lizzy Ogle and George Heartsong who combine diverse influences of folk, jazz and world music into a soulful celebration of nature and community. Their short set brought expansive harmony, rhythmic exploration and song-sharing for the midwinter Solstice moment.
Thursday December 11th 2025
Why Look at Animals? with Zed Nelson and Jo-Anne McArthur
How can contemporary photography, by focussing on our broken bonds with animals and the rest of the natural world, help drive a paradigm shift in our priorities and empathies?
Award winning photographers Jo-Anne McArthur and Zed Nelson were at Kairos to explore that question through two 20-minute visual presentations, followed by group discussion.
Zed Nelson’s new book, The Anthropocene Illusion examines the way in which we construct artificial, stage-managed environments to mask our destructive impact on the natural world. The six-year project received the Sony World Photography Award 2025 and has been exhibited widely. Zed discussed John Berger’s 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?” and its impact on his own work. Berger’s ground-breaking text explores how the ancient relationship between man and the rest of nature has been broken in the modern consumer age with the animals that used to be at the centre of our existence now marginalised and reduced to spectacle. It’s credited with influencing other recent art works, including a new performance piece by Complicite’s Simon McBurney and choreographer Crystal Pite, and a recent exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens.
Jo-Anne McArthur, whose photographs document sites of animal exploitation and the individual animals trapped within them, discussed the role photography can have in developing a new visual language, building a global movement and writing a new future. She focussed on We Animals, the platform she’s founded through which photographers can contribute to a vast, and growing, visual resource for those in animal advocacy.
Thursday December 4th 2025
Screening of “Power Station” with Hilary Powell, Dan Edelstyn & Howard Johns
Power Station (90mins, 2025) is the new film by artist-activists Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn. It began in the depths of lockdown with the question ‘’what could we do from where we live, with the people around us, to build power – of energy and imagination?’
Inspired by lockdown mutual aid initiatives, they decided to turn their street in Walthamstow into an energy-generating powerhouse – a prototype for a new way of living, with the hope of galvanising a wider push towards sustainable alternatives.
Directed by the duo, Power Station charts their turbulent journey, from pitching the idea to their neighbours and sleeping on the roof of their home to raising finance and launching a bid for a Christmas number one single. Smart, funny and inspiring, Hilary and Dan’s film shows community building in action and the power of art to change minds about what’s possible.
The screening was followed by a one-pot vegan supper and discussion with Dan, Hilary and Howard Johns, solar, renewable and community energy specialist, activist, CEO of POP and Author of “Energy Revolution: Your Guide to Repowering the Energy System“. When a community takes control of its own energy supply it seizes power from the fossil fuel corporations, the industry underpinning our political economy, and puts it in the hands of the people – a revolutionary act.
Tuesday December 2nd 2025
Screening of “Bank Job” by Hilary Powell & Dan Edelstyn
In advance of our screening of Power Station later in the week, we showed Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn’s previous film Bank Job – in which they buy and blow up £1.2 million of local debt.
An insightful and humorous investigation, Bank Job (1hr 27 mins, 2021) explores the truth about money and debt creation – and how to subvert the system in our favour. Watch the trailer here.
The screening was followed by supper that we ate together.
Thursday November 20th 2025
What Does the World Look Like with Care in Charge? with Sally Weintrobe
Imagine a world in which care is more powerful than uncare. Only with care in charge will life prove sustainable. What kind of repair work is needed to achieve this world?
In this talk Sally Weintrobe, a psychoanalyst who writes and talks on climate and on politics, focused on the issue of power, viewing the human mind as the site of a ceaseless power struggle between forces of care and uncare.
She argued that to repair our world we must first repair the damage done to our minds by what she calls the culture of uncare. This culture’s perverse – and entirely instrumental – aim is to attack our capacity to care, weaken our sense of lively entitlement to care, and rob care of its power to act for the good.
Sally’s talk was based on the ideas she’s developing for a new book on power relations within the psyche, social groups and the political process. Her previous writing includes “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare” (2021), “Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death” (co-author, 2023) and “With Climate in Mind” (co-editor, 2025).
Wednesday November 19th 2025
Book Club: “The Word for the World is Forest”
For our November Book Club, we read Ursula K Le Guin’s 1972 science fiction novel “The Word for the World is Forest”.
“When the inhabitants of a peaceful world are conquered by the bloodthirsty yumens, their existence is irrevocably altered. Forced into servitude, the Athsheans find themselves at the mercy of their brutal masters. Desperation causes the Athsheans, led by Selver, to retaliate against their captors, abandoning their strictures against violence. But in defending their lives, they have endangered the very foundations of their society. For every blow against the invaders is a blow to the humanity of the Athsheans. And once the killing starts, there is no turning back.” (Publisher’s description)
Saturday November 15th 2025
Artivism Futures: Reimagining Human Rights Activism
How is creative activism (artivism) transforming human rights work across the globe?
During this special, day-long event — a collaboration between the Art Rights Truth research project at the University of York, Amnesty International, and CIVICUS — we explored how to build creative resistance for the long term.
Last year, Art Rights Truth (ART) collaborated with Amnesty International and CIVICUS on two separate calls, inviting artists and activists to work together. The first, titled ‘Conversations with Reports’, responded to an Amnesty International report on the right to protest in Europe, and the second to the international ‘We Are (for) Civil Society’ initiative by CIVICUS. The result of these collaborations was a series of works that offered distinctive perspectives on the right to protest and its value to civil society, respectively.
The day featured a mini-exhibition of some of those works; a panel discussion, Sustaining Creative Resistance: Building Artivism Ecosystems for Long- Term Impact, with artivists Jona Wolf from Gear Up!, Kevin Bathman from Project Future Malaysia and human rights practitioner Renee Karunungan; and a hands-on zine-making workshop with Shift Slow.
Other participants included Bound, Desobediencia Civil, Echoes of Resistance, Fingerprint Labyrinth, Trust the Protest Zine, Protect the Protest – Thawing the Chilling Effect, The Right to Protest Seen by Children, A0 of Freedom, We Remember, Art in the Heart of Community, Carnival of the Bold 2025: Reimagining Malaysia’s Collective Future, and We Remember.
This event was for activists, community organisers, human rights campaigners, artists, academics and everyone interested in creative activism and safeguarding our civil spaces and our right to protest.
Friday November 14th 2025
Launch of Artivism Futures
We launched Artivism Futures: Reimagining Human Rights Activism, a special event taking place the following day, with a drinks night featuring four short film screenings. This was a mixer for those attending an invited workshop during the day, those registered for the Saturday event, and anyone else who wanted to come along.
Entry was free with a pay bar serving alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and vegan food.
Tuesday November 11th 2025
Reviving the Commons: The Civil Commons
The Civil Commons is the structure of institutions that ensure every commoner has an equal right to justice. The Civil Commons is built on principles of affordable representation, independent qualified judiciary and full respect for due process. The withering of our Civil Commons has been one of the least noticed tragedies in the decline and loss of our Commons. How might we revive and expand our Civil Commons?
In this participatory event – part of our year-long series on the Commons – we explored a vision for our Civil Commons as the basis for a set of principles and demands for inclusion in a new Charter of the Commons being developed at Kairos.
Economist Guy Standing outlined the history of the Civil Commons, followed by a series of short presentations from legal and social policy experts on the principles and values they would like to see enshrined in the Charter, combining both a radical approach with some first steps towards achieving it.
Contributions were from David Whyte, Legal scholar at Queen Mary University of London, Apolline Rogers, Head of Innovation Lab, Client Earth, David Hunter, senior counsel at law firm Bates Wells, Awol Allo, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Sheffield, and Neil Howard, social protection scholar and anthropologist from the University of Bath. We then broke into small groups to explore their ideas before coming back together for a final plenary discussion.
No previous knowledge was required – either of the Commons generally or the Civil Commons specifically. All were welcome to contribute or just come to listen.
Thursday November 6th 2025
Future Visions: An Evening of Shared Readings
For the latest in our series of reading evenings, we shared excerpts from books, essays, poems and other texts that offer a radical vision for the future. All were invited to propose a short reading or just come along to listen.
We heard passages from “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing”; “Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell; “No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain” by Rebecca Solnit; “Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto” by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser; and poems by Franny Choi and Pablo Neruda, and by participant readers Caz Dennett and Lennart Pasch.
Tuesday November 4th 2025
Open Projects Night
Open Projects is our regular open mike night, where we learn about each others projects, build connections and offer each other support.
The evening included a series of presentations, followed by questions, discussion and offers of support, and a one-pot vegan supper that we ate together. Projects included Lumie Okado and Emma Hafner with “Emmie”, a mobile library made from scrap materials found around London; Tristan Copley Smith with “Fungal Futures”, a concept for a documentary about human/ fungal interactions based on anthropologic study and research conducted at Kew Gardens; and Hugh Barnard with Cclite Alternative Currency Software, an open source journey and learning experience.
Open Projects is for: Anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.
Friday October 31st 2025
Friday Drinks featuring “Fools Leap” with Orlando Seale & Friends
The first Friday in our new series of music and entertainments nights featured Fools Leap, a music project created by artist/performer and Kairos regular Orlando Seale, in which he’s joined by a fluid group of collaborators. At the core of the project is unknowing, listening and improvisation.
Orlando and his guests shared “Into Something Rich and Strange”, a collage of songs and poems inspired by Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The 30 minute piece explored themes of transformation, cycles in life, mystery, fooling and dreaming.
Orlando was joined by musicians Alice Dyson (violin and voice), Patricia Ramirez (viola), Tom Curzon (double-bass and voice) and Tom Dyson (piano). Entry to Friday music and entertainments nights is free for Community Members.
Tuesday October 28th 2025
Could Radical Democracy Avert Collapse? with Luke Kemp
Why have previous societies collapsed? What did it mean for the people living through it? Is our own globalised, industrialised society also heading for collapse and what can we do to prevent it?
In this talk, Luke Kemp, researcher at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk, explored the ideas in his recent book “Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse”. Through a radical retelling of human history, he dispelled many myths about civilisation and collapse.
Considering the ways forward for our own society, he looked at how different forms of Open Democracy, from citizens assemblies to mass digital deliberations, might help us to avoid the catastrophic risks we face today.
Saturday October 25th 2025
Town Anywhere: Rehearsing a Future of Multi-Species Flourishing
“Town Anywhere is an extraordinary exercise. It invites us to step into the future, to reimagine and rebuild the world, and to then inhabit it. One of the most magical things I’ve ever been part of. Give your imagination a treat!” Rob Hopkins, Transition Network
Town Anywhere is a day-long, immersive and participatory experience that brings people together to imagine, build and then inhabit a vision of how the places all beings share could develop in the future.
Acknowledging the climate and nature crisis we are in and the uncertain future we face, it uses future scenarios, large-scale model-making, group work, timed challenges, and celebration to enable participants to play and practice community visioning, ideation and storytelling in an imaginary, but tangible, environment.
In this iteration of Town Anywhere, the concept of multi-species justice – a recognition that humans must work with and alongside the more-than-human in empathetic relationship – was core.
Facilitated by artists Ruth Ben-Tovim and Lucy Neal, participants traveled forward in time to 2035 to rehearse the future, imagining and building a flourishing, resilient and just town which, despite ongoing climate, ecological and social challenges, cares for the earth, multispecies kin and all future generations. At the end of the day, we time traveled back home to 2025 to harvest the learning.
Tuesday October 23rd 2025
Co-Creating the Future with Jean Boulton
“The path is made through walking”.
This Daoist-informed quote by Antonio Machado (translated and adopted by Francisco Varela) conveys the complexity inherent in living systems, and the idea that we co-create the future through our actions and intentions. But what does it mean to see that all that we are shapes the future – heart and mind, conscious and unconscious, collective and individual, past and present? And how does connection to place and relationship to others shape our insights, strengthen our resolve, and allow us to re-examine long-buried darknesses as well as to surface hidden treasures?
In this talk, Jean Boulton, a leading thinker in the field of complexity science and author of The Dao of Complexity, explored what the science of complexity – with its emphasis on dynamic patterning, paradox and emergence – has to offer as we consider these questions.
She reflected on the uncanny resonance between Daoist philosophy from the 5th century B.C.E. and complexity science. How do these resonant perspectives shed light on change, on resilience, and indeed on collapse? And how do they help us to decide what to do, how to be and how to ‘cultivate’ ourselves – as the Daoists emphasise – with people, planet and the future in mind.
Saturday October 18th 2025
Colin Ward Festival of Anarchic Ideas, Tactics & Action
To explore the work of author and social theorist Colin Ward, we held a day-long festival of anarchic thinking, strategising and making. Through short talks, discussions and workshops, we considered how Colin Ward’s pragmatic anarchism could help us create alternative spaces in the city and build infrastructures of mutual aid, autonomy and resistance.
During his career, Colin Ward advocated the creation of cities, places and spaces based upon respect and bottom-up networks of self-help and participation: city-making as a mutual project. His books and writings celebrated moments where people had taken the opportunity to do things differently. For him, anarchy appears wherever people make space for it and nurture it: these are his ‘seeds beneath the snow’.
The day-long festival included: Three short talks on the key ideas that run through his work – including Ecology, Protest, Autonomy and Play – followed by small group discussion; Three short talks on Colin and why Colin’s ideas are so relevant today; A choice of workshops exploring tactics and strategies for action; and a final full group discussion of what emerged during the day.
The event – being organised in collaboration with Alicia Pivaro (London School of Architecture) and Paul Dobraszczyk (the Bartlett School of Architecture) – was designed to give activists, students, creatives, and anyone curious to find out more about Britain’s most famous anarchist, a hands-on experience of his ideas and how they might be applied today.
There were contributions from Tim Waterman, Professor of Landscape Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL; Paul Dobraszczyk, architectural writer, photographer and lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL; David McEwen, architect and co-founder of Unit 38; Roman Krznaric, social philosopher, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing and Author of History for Tomorrow; Carl Levy, Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London and author of Anarchists and the City: Governance, Revolution and the Imagination; and Jere Kuzmanic, urbanist and researcher at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya. (Unfortunately, Ruth Kinna, Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University and author of The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism, was unable to join us.)
Friday October 17th 2025
Colin Ward Festival Launch & Mixer
We held a drinks night special to launch the Colin Ward Festival of Anarchic Ideas, Tactics & Action which took place the following day.
Wednesday October 15th 2025
Book Club: “Anarchy in Action” by Colin Ward
In the run up to our Colin Ward Festival of Anarchic Ideas, Tactics & Actions, we discussed Colin Ward’s classic text Anarchy in Action (1973).
The argument of the book, in the author’s words, “is that an anarchist society, a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism.”
Thursday September 25th 2025
Recovering the Middle Voice (or How to Act in a World that Surpasses Us) with Valentin Gerlier
Our current situation has led to radical despair about the value and limits of human action. For some, faced with a bewilderingly complex set of interlocking crises, daily actions feel like “too little, too late”. For others, this moment calls for ever more urgent, radical action and monumental changes at all levels. Caught between these nihilist and epic extremes, many of us, with good reason, feel disoriented about the value of our action.
In this talk, music, literature and philosophy scholar Valentin Gerlier of Schumacher College creatively explored the concept of the “middle voice” to help us rethink the notion of action. In certain languages such as ancient Greek or Sanskrit, the middle voice offers an alternative to either passive or active tenses, and suggests that every “doing” is also an “undergoing”.
Whatever else it may be, our existential crisis is enmeshed in myths of progress as a kind of active, heroic achievement and of power as complete autonomy. These have led us to equate agency and identity with the active life, and to look on passivity as an abdication of responsibility or even a moral vice.
The middle voice – an attentive, yet highly creative way of being and acting in the world – offers an alternative way through. It suggests both partnership and participation in a reality that, at the same time, also exceeds us. Learning to inhabit the world differently doesn’t just entail system change and theoretical overhaul. When we let go of the bias for heroic activity, approach action in a different way and come to inhabit the middle voice, a surprising way forward opens up.
Tuesday September 23rd 2025
How Do We Live a Life in an Era of Collapse with Sarah Wilson
Sarah Wilson has just finished a three-year project (culminating in a forthcoming book) investigating systems collapse – through a spiritual, psychological, philosophical and data-led lens.
In this talk, she explored, not the gritty devastating details of what’s happening to the world, but how we can now live a meaningfully life through it. How do we move forward when there is no longer “hope” that we will “make it”? What do we cleave to now? Is prepping the answer? What do we turn our attention to if there are no longer “solutions”? How do we deal with the dissonance and destruction?
She drew on her experience as a mainstream journalist (she was News Corp opinion columnist, editor in chief of Cosmopolitan Australia and host of Masterchef Australia) to share how we can bring the difficult message to others and to cut through the global resistance to the subject. Ultimately, she argued, collapse presents us with an invitation – to rise from our avoidant adultescent numbness into a vibrant, noble maturity, and into our full humanity. Which is what we have been craving for generations.
Saturday September 20th 2025
Kairos at How the Light Gets In with Roger Hallam
We hosted a mini Kairos salon at the How The Light Gets In festival, London. This was a second opportunity to hear Roger Hallam’s talk On Being, In Prison following his appearance at Kairos Tottenham Court Road earlier in the month.
Described by The New Statesman as the 34th most influential progressive person in the UK, Roger has been behind some of the world’s most influential social movements. He was recently released from prison after receiving the longest sentence ever for nonviolent action.
Roger spoke about his experience in prison from three perspectives: materialism (“it is what it is”), postmodernism (“you just can’t say”), and religion (“glory be to God”). He argued that unlearning how we look at ourselves and the world will be our central political, cultural, and spiritual challenge as extreme ruptures tear away our defences and repressions. What does it mean to act in the face of ecological breakdown, and how might collective courage still shape the future?
Tuesday September 16th 2025
Open Projects Night
We held our regular open mike night, where we learnt about each others projects, built connections and offered each other support.
Open Projects is for: Anyone with a radical idea they’d like to share and workshop. Anyone setting up or running a small Kairos-aligned project who needs support. Anyone with skills and experience they’d like to share. Anyone who would like to help grow our interconnectedness.
The evening included a series of short interactive presentations, a chance to workshop a few of the projects presented, and a one-pot vegan supper that we ate together.
Tuesday September 16th 2025
When Are We? with Vanessa Andreotti & Alnoor Ladha
Canadian-based Vanessa Andreotti, who was making a rare appearance in London, was at Kairos to discuss her recent work and thinking.
In conversation with Alnoor Ladha, she explored how collapse invites us to re-examine time itself, moving from modernity’s linear clock toward ancestral, planetary, and relational rhythms.
Vanessa is author of Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism; Towards Braiding (with Elwood Jimmy) and Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity and Collapse with Compassion and Accountability. She is one of the founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective and Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. Alnoor Ladha is an activist, political strategist and community organiser, and Co-director of Transition Resource Circle.
Sunday September 14th 2025
Slowing Collapse With a Money Commons with Jem Bendell & Matthew Slater
Jem Bendell and Matthew Slater hosted an interactive and fun exploration of why and how communities can reclaim their economic sovereignty as part of their efforts towards collapse preparedness. After two short talks, they facilitated the participatory Trading Floor game, which was followed by a discussion of the ideas that arose.
The Trading Floor game offers a dynamic, hands-on experience of how money systems shape behaviour. It sparks deep insight into cooperation, competition, scarcity, and abundance. Players learn by doing, gaining fresh perspectives on economics, value exchange, and community resilience in a playful and thought-provoking way.
Matthew and Jem aimed to show the benefits of any new mechanisms of exchange, including currencies, being held in the Commons. Matthew has decades of experience in software, training and guidance for communities to exchange goods and services without money. Jem has been researching and promoting such systems both before and during his work on societal collapse risk and response. Neither live in the UK so this was a rare opportunity.
Saturday September 13th 2025
Kairos at the Stroud Festival of Commoning: Reviving the Money Commons
As part of our series of events to crowdsource the drafting of a new Charter of the Commons, we hosted a discussion on the Money Commons at the Stroud Festival of Commoning 2025.
Inspired by the 1217 Charter of the Forest, and the social struggle that preceded it, as well as the current surge of interest in the Commons across the world, we’ve been exploring what principles and demands a new Charter might contain.
In this interactive session, with Matthew Slater, Rob Callender and Isabel Carlisle, we discussed what governance structures would be needed to select, legitimate and manage a people-led financial system; what role a new Commons Charter might play in such a radical transformation; and what we can learn from the Chartists of the 1830s, and other social struggles, about how to galvanise a modern movement in response to the many interconnected crises we now face.
Wednesday September 10th 2025
Book Club: “All Art is Ecological” by Timothy Morton
For our first Book Club after the summer break, we discussed “All Art is Ecological” by philosopher Timothy Morton. This short work explores the strangeness of living in an age of mass extinction, and shows us that emotions and experience are the basis for a deep philosophical engagement with ecology.
Sunday September 7th 2025
“On Being, In Prison” with Roger Hallam
In 2023, The New Statesman named Roger Hallam the 34th most influential progressive person in the UK. A year later he was given a five year prison sentence for making a short speech on a zoom call asking people to engage in civil disobedience. It was the longest sentence ever given to anyone doing nonviolent action. He was recently been let out on license.
In this interactive talk, Roger spoke about his experience in prison from three perspectives: materialism (“it is what it is”), postmodernism (“you just can’t say”), and religion (“glory be to God”). He argued that unlearning how we look at ourselves and the world will be our central political, cultural, and spiritual challenge as extreme ruptures tear away our defences and repressions. Only in the face of terror will we find the courage needed to re-make the world.
Roger was as hard-hitting as ever. Some things don’t change.
Saturday July 12th 2025
Summer Party
We held a party before we wound down for the Summer. There was music from duo Rey Yusuf & Victoria Couper, stencil-making with Paris68 Redux, a Blackjack table, complimentary vegan supper and cocktails.
Rey’s credits include award-winning contemporary folk band Tell Tale Tusk, dream-folk band Something Sleeps and samba band Pocket Bloco). Victoria is a cappella trio Voice who’s sung with world-jazz ensemble Grand Union Orchestra and founded Joglaresa and Musica Secreta. The pair, who met singing with Greek Epic-inspired band Daemonia Nymphe, have spent many years improvising and exploring together. They shared their new collaboration, delving into folk, world, and early music, alongside their own compositions. There was ukulele, harpsicle (small lever harp, not strange new harp-shaped popsicle), percussion, and voices. Participation was welcomed and encouraged.
Blackjack, a development of the 18th century game Twenty-one, is the world’s most widely played casino banking game. It was first referenced by Miguel de Cervantes in a tale about the card cheats of Seville. We also had Michael Collins from Paris68 Redux who created a stencil of our logo with guests invited to make their own Kairos T-shirt, bag or patch.
Wednesday July 9th 2025
Book Club: “Is a River Alive?” by Robert Macfarlane
“At its heart is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings – who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Inspired by the activists, artists and lawmakers of the young ‘Rights of Nature’ movement, Macfarlane takes the reader on an exhilarating exploration of the past, present and futures of this ancient, urgent concept.
Is a River Alive? flows like water from the mountains to the sea, over three major journeys: The first is to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened with destruction by gold-mining. The second is to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is under way. The third is to north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river – the Mutehekau or Magpie – is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign.
Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream who rises a mile from Macfarlane’s house, and flows through his own years and days. Passionate, immersive and revelatory, Is a River Alive? is at once Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date. Lit throughout by other minds and voices, it invites us radically to reimagine not only rivers but also life itself.”
Thursday July 3rd 2025
Is an Ecological Civilisation Possible? with David Tyfield
Many now argue that our current civilisation is finished. But could a new, and better, civilisation take its place? And what might we learn from rising global superpower China about how that future could look?
In 2018, the Chinese constitution was amended to include the concept of “ecological civilisation” – both as philosophical vision and strategic goal. In this talk, David Tyfield, Professor in Sustainable Transitions and Political Economy at the University of Lancaster, used the fascinating, contradictory case of China to interrogate the idea that civilisations are inherently unsustainable.
What might we learn from the rise of China about the future global order, climate action and the very nature of ‘civilisation’ itself?
Tuesday July 1st 2025
Kairos Deep Conversations: How Can We Find the Power to Act?
We held an evening of guided conversation about how to find our agency in a time of climate and ecological breakdown, what we can do and who we can we do it with.
The evening included a series of structured one-to-one and small group discussions in response to a set of carefully chosen questions, a break for a one-pot vegan supper that we ate together, reflections from Charlie Gardner (conservationist, activist, and author of a forthcoming book on what we all can do in response to the climate and nature crisis) and a concluding full group discussion.
This was an invitation to combine theories of change with personal stories, to find empowerment in community, explore our own limits, and build solidarity and understanding.
Due to a family bereavement, Kimberley Hare, who was going to join Charlie in leading the discussion was not able to take part. Kimberley is the founder of the Heart Community Group and the author of “At the Edge: What Is Mine to Do? And Who Can I Do it With?” She also leads regular 4-day retreats that support people in answering that same question.
