Wednesday May 14th, 6.30 for 7pm

Clothing culture has been hijacked by the growth imperative. The industrial fashion system is creating insupportable amounts of waste and pollution whilst failing to provide for human needs. The industry contributes 10% of global carbon emissions, with this on track to grow 40% by 2030 (from 2022). This growth is enabled by fossil fuel by-products, with 67% of fibres made from cheap synthetics.

There are alternatives. We can reclaim our clothing cultures. Commons-based clothing models, in which communities steward their collective wealth, are overwhelmingly sustainable and sufficient, meaningful and culturally enriching.

As part of Kairos’ year-long series on the Commons, we’re coming together to co-create a vision for how to revive our clothing systems.

In this participatory event – co-hosted by OurCommon.Market, a platform for commons-based clothing practices – we’ll hear a series of short provocations from experts on the fashion commons: anthropologist Sandra Niessen, designer Alice Holloway, fashion ecologist and textile systems designer Zoe Gilbertson and maker, activist and co-founder of Fantasy Fibre Mill, Nick Evans.

Questions they’ll address will include: How could small scale, bio-regional, fair and regenerative clothing production become the default? How can we make these alternatives sufficiently persuasive? How could a pluriverse of fashion cultures flourish? What challenges are keeping them in the margins? What rights of fashion commoners need to be protected, and how?

We’ll then break into small groups to discuss how we might begin to make these paradigm shifts. Collectively, we’ll then agree which ideas to take forward to an event later in the year which will focus on the Cultural Commons more generally, and which will result in a set of demands to be included in a new Charter of the Commons.

No previous knowledge is required – either of the Commons generally or fashion cultures specifically. All are welcome to contribute or just come to listen.

Tuesday May 20th, 6.30 for 7pm

Britain’s common land has been systematically depleted through encroachment, enclosure, privatisation, commodification and financialisation. The result has been chronic mis-management of our land, including over grazing, the depletion of peatlands, soil degradation and widespread habitat and species loss. How can we revive the Commons and restore our land?

In this participatory event – part of our year-long series on the Commons – we’ll explore a vision for the land commons, and draw up a set of demands for inclusion in a new Charter of the Commons being developed at Kairos over the course of the year.

We’ll hear a series of short presentations from land, river and commons experts: Economist Guy Standing, Carol Wilcox of the Labour Land Campaign, Anthony Hurbert from DEFRA, writer and ecologist Helen Baczkowska, Tom Chance of the Community Land Trust Network and Carey Doyle from Scotland’s Rural College. 

We’ll then break into groups to discuss their ideas before coming back together to collectively agree on a set of principles and demands to include in the Charter.

No previous knowledge is required – either of the Commons generally or land issues specifically. All are welcome to contribute or just come to listen.

Thursday May 29th, 6.30 for 7pm

The urgent question of the moment is not just how to constrain a surging authoritarianism, but to figure out what compelling new vision for governance, provisioning, and social order we should pursue.

The “old normal” cannot be restored, and in any case, it has failed to deal with climate change, savage inequalities, predatory markets, democratic decline and social alienation. New types of social relations and institutional forms are desperately needed; the confusion and disarray in current politics provides the opportunity to create them.

Drawing on his just-published book “Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition”, David Bollier, a long-time activist/scholar at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (US), will describe the wide variety of commons now flourishing outside the control of the corporate market/state. A globe-spanning Commonsverse – encompassing land, water, agriculture, food systems, energy, digital networks, mutual aid, alternative currencies, and much more – is opening up new vectors of democratic and economic possibility. It represents an unacknowledged “parallel polis,” as Czech visionary Vaclav Havel might have put it.

Since capitalist modernity remains a major impediment to change, David will also focus on several key challenges for expanding the Commonsverse: the re-configuration of state power to support commoning; the development of (noncapitalist) “relationalized finance”; creative legal hacks on Western jurisprudence; the mainstreaming of social cooperation as an institutional form; bioregionalism as an integrated ecological/economic vision; and new modes of collaboration between commoners in the Global South and North.

Tuesday March 18th, 6.30 for 7pm

As part of our year-long series on the Commons, we’re coming together to co-create a vision for the Ocean Commons and explore how we might bring it about.

The ocean is under attack. For decades it has been exploited for the benefit of the few – coastal communities are struggling to survive, fish populations are plummeting and the ocean is awash with pollutants. The demands we are placing on the ocean are increasing year on year. This “Blue Acceleration” is leading us towards disaster. But another ocean is possible.

In this participatory event, featuring a series of short presentations from oceans experts followed by small group discussion, we’ll explore how to reinstate the ocean as a Commons. Economist Guy Standing will explore the necessary laws and governing mechanisms needed to revive the Blue Commons. Political theorist Chris Armstrong will advocate for Blue Justice: The ocean is a more-than-human space, so whose Commons is it? Social movement scholar Antje Scharenberg will explore Blue Activism, asking what kind of ocean democracy we can hope for. And Tobias Troll from NGO Seas at Risk will explain the concept of the Blue Doughnut: How can we care for the ocean and look after ourselves?

Collectively, we’ll then begin drafting a set of demands to be included in the Charter of the Commons being developed at Kairos over the course of the year, and which could initially be presented at the UN Oceans Conference 2025 taking place in June.

No previous knowledge required – either of the Commons generally or ocean issues specifically. All are welcome to contribute or just come to listen.

Wednesday March 5th, 6.30 for 7pm

Britain’s common lands have long been contested. Historic enclosures of Commons changed the very fabric of Britain’s society and ecology and cast a still lingering shadow over rural England.

The Commons that remain today are often misunderstood, with their legal protections and ownership hard to grasp. Helen will de-mystify these complex issues and look at how common land remains at the very heart of debates over grazing in the uplands, and of the management of flood waters, re-wilding and peatlands.

In this talk followed by discussion, writer, ecologist and environmental activist Helen Baczkowska will explore what common land is in the 21st century and how crucial it is for nature conservation and public access, as well as what conversations about its governance, both past and present, can teach us about the Commons of the future.

Tuesday February 18th, 6.30 for 7pm

Bioregions, and bioregioning, are seeing a worldwide renaissance that offers a viable response to the polycrisis. How could this very old model of human organising become a template for the future?

Bioregion literally means ‘life region’ and from the earliest times our species has aligned itself with nature’s life-support systems of food, water, energy, shelter, plant medicines and materials for making, such as wood and stone. The agricultural revolution of the Neolithic, and more recently the industrial revolution, set up a metabolic rift between those life systems and human societies. We’re experiencing the consequences of that today.

Isabel Carlisle, co-founder of the Bioregional Learning Centre (BLC) in South Devon, will explore how bioregional organising could help build regional resilience and reinvent the idea of being a citizen of place. In the same way that there would be no commons without commoning, ‘bioregioning’ is a relational practice that animates a region and addresses the impacts of geo-systemic change on natural and human-made systems. More than that, it’s about meeting the deep human need of belonging to place.

The rise in interest in the global and local commons and the fraying of our social, economic and governance structures are all putting air beneath the wings of the bioregional movement. Isabel will describe the establishment of bioregioning in places as far apart as Costa Rica, the Arctic and Cascadia in Western North America. She will detail the work of the BLC to create the infrastructure needed to establish bioregioning in South Devon (including the creation of a devolved citizen council, bioregional financing and other projects). She will argue that bioregions and bioregioning could help us gain the agency we need to start shaping our future.

Thursday January 16th, 6.30 for 7pm

Could the revival of “the Commons” provide the basis for a new progressive political agenda? What would a radically new form of governance look like that was based on equitable, ecologically-sustainable shared common wealth, and how could we start moving towards it?

Throughout 2025, Kairos will be holding a series of discussions focused on the Commons. To launch the series, economist Guy Standing will set out a framework for a Commons perspective. Using education as an example, he will explain what a Commons entails, counter some misconceptions (such as the flawed thinking behind the “tragedy of the commons”) and explore the governance principles required to preserve or revive our Commons.

Guy will argue that a new progressive politics should be centred on a revival of the Commons and Commoning and suggest a direction for future discussions. Depending on the development of our conversations over the coming months, one outcome might be the drafting of a modern Charter of the Commons.

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.

Thursday January 25th
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Talk starts 7pm

For thousands of years, most people did their utmost to be out of labour, out of jobs. But for the past two centuries, being in jobs has been put on a pedestal. Karl Marx described jobs as “alienated activity”. In reality, for most people a job means being in a position of subordination. The tragedy is that labourists have reduced work to labour.

We now have a wonderful opportunity to rescue work from labour and to revive the idea of commoning and the related idea of leisure as distinct from recreation and consumption. In the process, we need to escape from the fetish of GDP growth, with its ecological neglect, and boost the work, commoning and leisure that most people value and want. This is the desirable “future of work”

Guy Standing is Professorial Research Associate at SOAS University of London, a founding member and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), and author of The Precariat, Plunder of the Commons and The Blue Commons. This talk, his second at Kairos, will draw on the ideas in his latest book The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in an Age of Uncertainty, which has just been published.

Tuesday July 16th, 6.30 for 7pm

How can we replace the neo-liberal idea of “globalisation” with other ways of thinking about global connectedness and our place in the world?

Tim Waterman, professor of landscape at the Bartlett and author of The Landscape of Utopia, will present some new tools to help us reimagine “planetarity”: earthliness, worldliness, and globality. His talk will take in maps and Utopia, colonialism and protest, enclosure and the commons, as well as the romantic and the poetic as different ways of thinking about the planetary.

He’ll also discuss the notion of “double consciousness”, a term first used in 1903 by WEB Du Bois to describe how Black Americans were forced to see the world and themselves through the eyes of a white supremacist society. This double consciousness also applies to our contradictory experience of the natural world. Landscapes, transformed by colonialism and imperialism both past and present, are where power and financial relationships are played out on a global level. Yet at the same time they are also the setting of everyday lives and everyday experience.

Tim’s talk will offer fresh insights for anyone trying to find alternative ways of conceiving, working with, caring for and “commoning” our Earth, while grappling with the predicament of climate and nature breakdown.

Wednesday November 15th
Doors open at 12.45pm. Video begins at 1pm. 

For the first in a new series of recorded lunchtime lectures, we’re screening a talk by economist Guy Standing about his 2019 book, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth.

In this video, Guy explores the history of the Commons (our land, air, health service, schooling, information etc) including the now-forgotten Charter of the Forest. He charts the erosion of our shared common wealth through enclosure, privitisation and financialisation by the rentier class and large corporations, and presents a vision for a new Commons Charter to restore what’s been lost.

Doors will open at 12.45pm and the video will start at 1pm. Bring a packed lunch.

Everyone is then invited to take part in our collective art project, Visioning the Commons, inspired by Guy‘s Kairos talk in June (and piloted at Green Gathering festival in August). Share with us, in words or drawings, what you’d like to see returned to the Commons. Paper, pens and paint provided.

We also have copies in the Kairos library of Plunder of the Commons and Guy’s later book about the oceans, The Blue Commons (2022). Kairos will remain open throughout the afternoon for anyone who’d like to stay on and read.

Free entry. No booking required. 

Friday June 9th, 6.30pm

The commons belong to everybody in society and to everybody equally. They include the natural commons – the land, rivers, sea and seabed, and the air we breathe – as well as the social, civil, cultural and educational commons.

And yet our commons have been systematically depleted, through encroachment (and neglect), enclosure, privatisation, commodification and financialisation. The erosion has accelerated in the past forty years since the neo-liberal economics revolution associated with Margaret Thatcher, and ratcheted up in the period of austerity.

In this talk and discussion, economist Guy Standing, author of Plunder of the Commons and The Blue Commons, will argue that we need a new progressive politics that demands a revision of the commons and compensation for their loss. We’ll also discuss one possible objective, a Commons Charter, and how such a manifesto for reviving common wealth might be achieved.