Friday October 4th, 6.30 for 7pm

“One of the most perceptive and thought-provoking books…Essential reading for these turbulent times.” – Amitav Ghosh

In anticipation of Dougald Hine’s forthcoming Kairos talk, for our next meeting we’re reading “At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics and All the Other Emergencies”.

Dougald, environmental thinker, co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and co-host of “The Great Humbling” podcast, had spent most of his life talking to people about climate change. And then one afternoon in the second year of the pandemic, he found he had nothing left to say. Why would someone who cares so deeply about ecological destruction want to stop talking about climate change now?

Thursday October 17th, 6 for 6.30pm

Documentary The Square (“Al-Maydan”, 2013, 1hr 48mins, dir:Jehane Noujaim) follows the Egyptian revolution through the eyes of a number of activists on the ground. Taking as its starting point the 2011 resignation of Hosni Mubarak after mass protests in Tahrir Square, it charts the subsequent political manoeuvring by the Muslim Brotherhood, the election of president Mohammed Morsi and Morsi’s removal by the army in 2013.

The film shows both how popular protest can achieve extraordinary results and how entrenched power will seek to hijack mass movements for its own ends.

Following the screening and a break for supper, Egyptian writer and researcher Nihal El Aasar will lead a discussion on the lessons the Egyptian revolution holds for the climate and other mass movements today.

Saturday October 19th, 10.30am-4.30pm approx

As part of a new series exploring experiments in community building, we’ll be combining a walk through the Kent countryside with a visit to DARES.

Located within a rewilded corner of Kent, DARES is a meeting place where activists from diverse groups can come to come together to rest and cross-pollinate ideas. Since 2023, DARES has been led by a core team of 10-20 people, alongside a wider community of part-time visitors and remote advocates, with a dedicated group that lives on-site, tending to the land, local wildlife, and the experiences of the visitors that come through.

In the morning, we’ll take the train to Edenbridge (approx 1 hour from Victoria) and hike to DARES where we’ll stop for lunch and learn more about the project. We’ll then hike to Hever in the afternoon where we’ll catch the train back to London. Exact details of the walk to follow, but expect a total of four to five hours walking time at a steady pace, so you’ll need a good level of fitness.

Tuesday October 22nd, 6.30 for 7pm

Faced with an increasingly unpredictable world, we need to adjust our modernist, controlling mindset and learn how to live with uncertainty.

With changes to our climate, financial volatility, pandemic outbreaks and new technologies, uncertainty is everywhere making the future ever less knowable. Learning to navigate uncertainty will be essential as we respond to these and other challenges.

In this talk, Ian Scoones, Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies and author of Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World will argue we need to learn from those who live with, and from, uncertainty every day and to find new approaches, including ones reclaimed and adapted from other  times and cultures.

Drawing on experiences from across the world, Ian will explore themes of finance and banking, technology regulation, critical infrastructures, pandemics, natural disasters and climate change. He will contrast an approach centred on risk and control – where we assume we know about and can manage the future – with one that is more flexible and capable of, responding to uncertainty. This will require a radical rethinking of policies, institutions and practices if we are to successfully navigate uncertainties in an increasingly turbulent world.

Thursday October 24th, 6 for 6.30pm

The world we share is complex, constantly changing and alive. Yet in facing interwoven challenges we can sometimes be left feeling simultaneously over- and under- whelmed. How do we meet (not match) the situations we find ourselves in? How can we unstick each other from the roles we play?

While there can be no straightforward solutions, learning to rigorously pay attention to our senses and our relationships with one another, and being curious about the underlying patterns that connect what we can’t see, is vital in creating the conditions for a healthier future for all of us. With this awareness, we can shape responses to effectively meet the complexity around us. Without it, we often enact simple responses to complex challenges which in turn create their own problems and stuck-ness.

Warm Data Labs – as conceived by Nora Bateson, filmmaker, educator and President of the International Bateson Institute – are immersive group processes which highlight interdependency and generate felt understanding and perception of living systemic patterns. By tending to what is moving and alive, we can create space for new responses to complex challenges. After all, is it possible to truly respond to the living world without information that is also alive?

Tuesday October 29th, 6.30 for 7pm

In his book, “At Work in the Ruins”, Dougald Hine lays out a choice that is often hidden behind the ways we talk about climate change: are we working for the big path, the attempt to secure and (somehow) make sustainable the promises of growth, progress and development which have been at the heart of the story modern societies tell about themselves? Or are we turning towards the small path, the set of branching paths that lead beyond the failure of these promises, working to create the conditions of possibility for “worlds worth living for”, on the far side of the end of the world as we thought we knew it?

In this talk with discussion, Dougald will explore the conversations the book has led him into and share his latest thinking. Together we’ll discuss how to release resources from existing systems so as to contribute to the work of the small path, the examples of new cultural and economic practices in which Dougald is finding clues for what comes next – and how we might scale these out, without falling into the traps that often accompany attempts at scaling up.

Wednesday October 30th, 6.30 for 7pm

In May 1829, strange reports surfaced from the Ariège department in the French Pyrenees: young male peasants, bizarrely dressed in women’s clothes, were gathering in the forests at night to chase away state forest guards and employees of ironworks. This was the raucous “War of the Demoiselles” (the Maiden’s War), a protest against the national French Forest Code of 1827 that restricted peasants’ use of the forests.

In this talk, historian Peter Sahlins will reflect on this long-forgotten episode and its relevance to today’s challenges of climate breakdown, social justice and access to the Commons.

As Peter describes in his book “Forest Rites” (1994), The Maiden’s War was not simply an archaic, primitive outburst of a vanishing peasant community, but a sophisticated response to capitalism, state-building, and environmental degradation in the nineteenth century.

Drawing on theories of popular protest developed by Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Natalie Davis about others, Peter will place the Maidens War within an animist peasant cosmology that structured local approaches to forest management, while reframing the story of carnival in relation to popular sovereignty.

In the discussion following his talk, he will invite reflections on the relevance of history to our current struggle to find equitable social responses to environmental degradation.

Tuesday November 12th, 6.30 for 7pm

Elizabeth Oldfield thinks a lot about the end of the world. Perhaps too much. The question that preoccupies her is “if it is the end of the world (or at least the end of the world as we have known it) what kind of people are needed? And how, exactly, do we become those people, given that panic, tribalism and self-protection come more easily?

In this talk followed by discussion, Elizabeth, author of “Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times” and host of The Sacred podcast, will argue that most ancient wisdom paths – particularly Christianity – have thought a lot about these questions, and offer some long forgotten medicine for the ills of our age.

Thursday November 14th – Sunday November 17th

Why are so many people apathetic and defeated? How can we bring more people into our movements? Why do we burn out, fall apart and split? (And can we avoid it?)

Join us for a three and a half day workshop with Sarah Stein Lubrano and Max Haiven of Sense and Solidarity, and grapple with some of the toughest challenges in organising and activism. Using Sense and Solidarity’s signature mix of psychological insight, radical imagination and strategy, we’ll explore how to make best use of our limited resources, overcome fear and factionalism, build solidarity and mobilise others.

We have a maximum of 25 spaces for this event, which will include a mix of succinct lectures, focused seminar-style discussions, experience sharing, creative exercises and role-play.

Together, we’ll learn what does and does not change people’s minds (hint: actions over words), how to be strategic about whose hearts and minds we want to change (it can’t be everyone); how and when activism can provide a welcoming community (and when it shouldn’t); how to disrupt and divide our opponents; and much much more.

Thursday November 14th, 6.30 for 7pm

The radical imagination is the force that allows us to envision and fight for different worlds. It is an essential part of successful struggles. While we often assume it’s what inspires struggle, the opposite is also true: it is when people struggle, together, to refuse intolerable conditions that the radical imagination sparks and reshapes the world.

The radical imagination can seem like a wooly, romantic concept until we recognise how deep a role the imagination plays in everyday life, not only as something that animates the creative spirit but a fundamental quality of our social minds as members of a cooperative species.

In this talk with discussion, Max Haiven, social theorist, organiser and co-author of The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, will explore what’s happened to the radical imagination in recent years, as seen in the uprising against the ongoing climate emergency, the resurgence of the far right, the cursed gift of social media and the rise of a global anti-colonial movement focused on the liberation of Palestine. 

Drawing on a wide range of examples from activism and art, Max will explore how the radical imagination can be “convoked” or called into being through acts of solidarity and collective creativity.  

Saturday November 16th, 3.30 for 4pm

As part of our Changing Hearts & Minds workshop, we’re hosting the live recording of an episode of the podcast What Do We Want?, with workshop hosts Sarah Stein Lubrano and Max Haiven.

For this episode of their brand new spicy-nerdy podcast, co-hosts Max and Sarah take on their most salacious topic yet: pleasure. Should activism be fun, or is that bourgeois? Should comrades sleep with one another, or should we somehow try (and probably fail) to stop that? Will there be dancing in our revolution, and if so will we all know the steps? And what, after all, could be more fun than a five-hour meeting about group process?

We’re often told our struggles will flop if we don’t make them more joyful and pleasurable. We lose so many comrades to burnout. But is the answer to embrace pleasure activism? And what about the troubling pleasures we’re less comfortable talking about, like gossip and righteousness?

Joined by jaded special guests (who’ve seen it all) and prompted by anonymous confessions and questions from those in attendance (“asking for a comrade”), Sarah and Max will create a safe space for everyone but themselves.

Tuesday December 3rd, 6.30 for 7pm

Join us for our regular Open Projects Night, where we’ll learn about each others projects, build connections and offer each other support.

This 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 will include a series of short interactive presentations, a chance to workshop a few of the projects presented, and a one-pot vegan supper that we’ll eat together.