Past Events at Kairos
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.
