Past Events at Kairos

Wednesday February 12th

Book Club: “The Commune Form” by Kristin Ross

We discussed “The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life” by radical historian Kristin Ross: An examination of the global resurgence of the commune and how they can become sites of liberation.

(Publishers description): When the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles over land – from the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Cop City in Atlanta, from the pipeline battles in Canada to Soulèvements de la terre – have reinvented practices of appropriating lived space and time. This transforms dramatically our perception of the recent past.

Rural struggles of the 1960s and 70s, like the “Nantes Commune,” the Larzac, and Sanrizuka in Japan, appear now as the defining battles of our era. In the defense of threatened territories against all manners of privatisation, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, new ways of producing and inhabiting are devised that side-step the state and that give rise to unprecedented kinds of solidarity built on pleasurable, fruitful collaborations. These are the crucial elements in the present-day reworking of an archaic form: the commune-form that Marx once called “the political form of social emancipation,” and that Kropotkin deemed “the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.

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Tuesday February 4th

Open Projects Night

We held our regular Open Projects Night, where we learned about each others projects, built connections and offered each other support.

We heard presentations from: Mark Mullen on “Rorshok“, Alicia Pivaro on “Anarchy in the Arctic”, Margret Mulowska on “The DARES Collective”; Janos Able on “Teams of Twelve” a plan to create an army of activist readers, Anna Boyle on “The Great Imagining” and Noah Martin with an update on “College of Modern Anxiety”.

Open Projects Night takes place on the first Tuesday of every other month. It’s 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.

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Tuesday January 28th

Screening of “All That Breathes”

“Every minute of this Oscar-nominated documentary is gold dust” – The Guardian

In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital.

In “All That Breathes” (2022, 1h 37m) director, director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerising chronicle of inter-species coexistence.

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Thursday January 23rd

Kairos Deep Conversations: What Does it Mean to Live a Good Life? with Georgie Nightingall

We held an evening of guided, small-group conversations exploring what it means to live a good life.

For our first Kairos Deep Conversations, co-hosted with Georgie Nightingall, we delved into how we define a good life in an era of ecological uncertainty and social transformation. Together, we reflected on the balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility, the role of spirituality, the wisdom of ancient and new economic systems, and how we can rekindle our connection to nature, community, and meaning. We followed a Deep Conversation Menu packed with carefully designed reflective questions, connecting personal storytelling with big ideas

Georgie, founder of the Trigger Conversations, is on a mission to intentionally design a more human world through the lost art of human conversation. . This was an invitation to think deeply, share openly and spark meaningful change.

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Thursday January 16th

Reviving the Commons: A Unifying Vision for Our Shared Common Wealth with Guy Standing

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 set out a framework for a Commons perspective. Focusing on education, he explained what a Commons entails, countered some misconceptions (such as the flawed thinking behind the “tragedy of the commons”) and explored the governance principles required to preserve or revive our Commons.

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Wednesday January 8th

Book Club: “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner

Sadie Smith – a 34-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics, bold opinions and clean beauty – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists led by the charismatic svengali Bruno Lacombe.

Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and at first finds Bruno’s idealism laughable – he lives in a Neanderthal cave and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism. But while Sadie is certain that her significant talents are leading her towards a successful resolution, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments and his own tragic story.

Creation Lake was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. The judges said: “It’s quite something to wrap a thought-provoking novel of ideas into a page-turning spy thriller, and to achieve a narrative voice that is so audaciously confident – and then subtly undercut it. This is a political novel on many levels: it includes radical leftists, utopianists, a reclusive guru obsessed with neanderthals, the shadowy forces of ruthless capitalism. Through it all Kushner examines how the individual interacts with, and disrupts, ideologies. That could sound dry – but her prose is so juicy, her narrator so jaunty, her worldbuilding so lush, that it’s anything but.”

Book Club meets on the second Wednesday of every month.

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Friday January 3rd

Kairos Club Drinks: New Years Special

We held our first drinks evening of 2025, a New Year’s special. Kairos will now be open for Club Drinks every Friday.

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Friday December 20th

Winter Solstice Celebration

We held a party to mark the passing of the longest night, with a short set of warm and uplifting songs from Gibbon & Goldfinch (aka Marcus Decker and Holly Cullen-Davies), fortune-telling by Kairos’s own Sibyl of Cumae, a one-pot vegan supper and cocktails from the pay bar.

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Tuesday December 17th

Hit ‘Em Where it Hurts: How to Create an Alternative to Capitalism with Rob Callender

How can we start to build a new, sustainable, democratic, community-owned economy?

In this immersive workshop – a combination of games and short talks – we discovered how debt, money and the capitalist economy really works, and explored the alternatives that are right under our noses. Led by Rob Callender, activist and co-founder of Kin Cooperative – a platform designed to allow communities to bypass the banks and save money together – we saw how open-source financial systems, and federations of cooperatives working together, could dramatically reconfigure the economy.

As Trump returns to the White House propelled by voters’ lived experience of the economy, how can we build structures that will change that experience, help people to help themselves, and halt the ever-more destructive, anti-democratic path of late-stage capitalism? We know those in power won’t do it for us.

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Sunday December 15th

Games Evening: Playing & Social

Following on from our Games Design Workshop with Matteo Menapace & Max Haiven earlier in the afternoon, we held a games evening. 

Games on offer included Matteo’s award-winning climate board game Daybreak Max’s soon-to-be-released Billionaires and Guillotines, Scrabble, Chess, Querkle and Backgammon, among others.

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Sunday December 15th

Games Design Workshop 

Games are among humanity’s most ancient technologies. They are not only a tool for having fun, they facilitate learning and transformation, from our earliest childhood and throughout our lives. How can games help us think, feel and act again in the face of the climate emergency? And how can thinking and practicing game design help activists, artists and advocates for climate justice reimagine and renew our approach?

With a focus on board games and convivial games (like those played at protests or in small groups), this workshop offered participants the opportunity to learn about the power of games and design their own.

It was led by Matteo Menapace, co-designer of the award-winning climate board game Daybreak and by Max Haiven, Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination and designer of the forthcoming Billionaires and Guillotines

The workshop was followed by a Board Games Social.

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Tuesday December 10th

Keeping the World Intact with Hugh Brody

The anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody has spent a lifetime immersed in communities of indigenous peoples of the Arctic and sub-Arctic.

In this talk followed by discussion, Hugh shared some stories of, and insights from, the people whose lives he’s been lucky enough to learn from. Those like the Inuit who have lived by keeping the world intact.

In Inuit culture, when a child receives a name, it isn’t just a name, but more a form of reincarnation. This speaks to the web of connections the Inuit experience, through time and across the land. Their recognition of these connections leads to knowledge, and ultimately to respect. This is but one example of a system of belief and social life that builds social equality and a sustainable environment.

Imperialism has shaped – and continues to shape – our world. Disastrous climate change is its environmental corollary. Indigenous peoples around the world know this all too deeply; they experience the most direct impacts. And they have led the way in resistance.

Perhaps the most difficult thing about our moment in history is the force of invasive pessimism. It has become a clouding darkness, a sense of inherent defeat. Understanding very different ways of being in the world – different systems of relating to one another and to all the life we depend on as part of a larger pattern – can provide some seeds of optimism.

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Friday December 6th

Book Club: “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey

“In this slender novel, Harvey seems to have encompassed all of humanity… It is an extraordinary achievement” – The Observer

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

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Wednesday December 4th

Screening of “The Nightingale’s Song” and “Puffling” with Sam Lee & Jessica Bishopp

Double Bill Screening: “Puffling” (20 mins, 2023) followed by “The Nightingale’s Song” (40 mins, 2023).

“The Nightingale’s Song” (by filmmakers Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee for Emergence Magazine) profiles folk singer Sam Lee and his campaign to save a bird on the edge of extinction.

Every year in late Spring, Sam leads groups of visitors through the Sussex woods to discover this elusive songbird and experience a magical late night duet as he joins the nightingale in song. Through Sam’s devotion to the nightingale, the film explores how deepening our relationship with the living world can inspire care, stewardship, and love.

Short documentary “Puffling”, directed by Jessica Bishopp, follows teenagers on a remote Icelandic island as they rescue pufflings (young puffins) from imminent danger. As pufflings leave their nests for the first time, they often get lost in town, mistaking the harbour lights for the moon.

Over the course of one night, Birta and Selma exchange night-time parties for puffin rescues. A coming-of-age documentary about growing up and making choices, “Puffling” explores the delicate interplay between wildlife, the environment, and human life.

The screenings were followed by supper and discussion with Jessica and Sam, who ended the evening with a traditional folk song.

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Tuesday December 3rd

Open Projects Night

This was our bi-monthly Open Projects Night, where we learnt about each others’ projects, built connections and offered each other support.

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.

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.

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Sunday December 1st

Sunday Reading Room

We experimented with Sunday opening hours for the newly launched library. We invited people to come and browse our books or bring their own, but not to use laptops, kindles, smartphones or other electronic devices.

For Sunday Reading Room to become a permanent fixture it will rely on volunteers to supervise the space. If you’d like to get involved you can join the WhatsApp group here or email us at events@kairos.london.

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Thursday November 28th

A New Cosmology: Feeling Our Way into the Imaginal with Ellie Robins

What is imagination? Today, we usually understand it as a private capacity for creative thinking. But for mystics through the ages, imaginal practice has meant something far larger: the capacity to access an expanded field of reality. This expanded dimension—the imaginal realm—is in fact more real than the material world, since it is the source and ground for events in the material world.

Over thousands of years of invasion and culture loss, increasing antagonism with land, economic strictures, and, for the last 500 years, ascendant rationalism, English culture has forgotten the existence of that realm. The result is our current reality of overlapping crises, with a crisis of cosmology at the heart of them all. The leading scientific scholarship tells us that we live in a fundamentally disjointed, irreconcilable universe, tattered by impenetrable dark matter. Little wonder that the future looks so dark.

What’s missing in our current cosmology is the healing, whole-making field that is the imaginal realm. It is the recognition that the full truth of our universe cannot be known by the intellect alone. Remembering how to access the imaginal means remembering and revaluing lost ways of knowing, primarily the way of the heart. It means redressing the centuries-old imbalance between rationalism and embodied, resonant, sensory, and heart-driven knowledge. And it means restoring cosmology as a felt sense, rather than a cognitive construct.

In this talk followed by discussion, independent scholar Ellie Robins presented a cosmology of the imaginal, and traced how English culture has become severed from it. She argued that what we’re missing is the healing, whole-making field that is the imaginal realm, and explored how we might rediscover and deepen our access to it.

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Tuesday November 26th

Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience (“SAFER”) with Rupert Read

We are deep into the danger zone and about to go much deeper. The meta-crisis – of which the climate crisis is merely the leading edge – is already upon us. It will increasingly define the rest of our lives and the lives of those who come after us.

While awareness of this is growing, it has yet to break through. Meanwhile, in many crisis-aware circles the fantasy persists that we can still call a halt to climate breakdown: admitting that we need to get serious about adaptation is seen as tantamount to ‘giving up’.

As we break through the 1.5 degrees guardrail, with devastating hurricanes across the Atlantic, deadly flooding in Spain and unprecedented rainfall here in the UK – and after what will almost certainly be another failed COP – Rupert Read, co-director of the Climate Majority Project, argued it’s time to shift our focus to preparedness.

With its new campaign Strategic Adaptation For Emergency Resilience, “SAFER”, the CMP is calling for an end to the delusion that our current civilisation has a future. By instead embracing a spirit of transformative and strategic adaptation we could, even now, co-create a new civilisation.

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Thursday November 21st

Sewing Circle

After a short break, our Sewing Circle returned. We invited you to bring your moth hole repairs, clothes alterations, and other sewing projects. We also worked on a collective craft project.

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Saturday November 16th

Podcast Recording of “What Do We Want?: The Pleasures of Activism” with Sense & Solidarity

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 and guests Martha Awojobi, Sita Balani and Zrinka Bralo.

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 created a safe space for everyone but themselves.

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Friday November 15th

Club Drinks & Mixer

We held a special Friday club drinks for Kairos regulars and the Kairos curious, everyone taking part in the Hearts and Minds workshop, students at the New School of the Anthropocene (housed at Kairos) and others involved with radical London spaces.

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Thursday November 14th

What Can We Learn from the Radical Imagination? with Max Haiven

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, explored 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 showed how the radical imagination can be “convoked” or called into being through acts of solidarity and collective creativity.

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Thursday November 14th – Sunday November 17th

Changing Hearts & Minds with Sense and Solidarity

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?)

In this three and a half day workshop, Sarah Stein Lubrano and Max Haiven of Sense and Solidarity, grappled with some of the toughest challenges in organising and activism. Using Sense and Solidarity’s signature mix of psychological insight, radical imagination and strategy, participants explored how to make best use of limited resources, overcome fear and factionalism, build solidarity and mobilise others.

The workshop included a mix of succinct lectures, focused seminar-style discussions, experience sharing, creative exercises and role-play.

Together, we learned 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.

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Tuesday November 12th

What Can Religion Teach Us About Living in Apocalyptic Times? with Elizabeth Oldfield

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, argued 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.

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Friday November 8th

Word-Making Salon with The Bureau of Linguistical Reality

The rapidly unfolding polycrisis has outpaced our ability to describe it. There are no words to communicate so many of the emotions, ideas and situations we’re now grappling with. How can we make the major cultural shifts required without the language with which to share our experiences, formulate new ideas and shape the collective imagination?

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a public participatory artwork by artists Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante. Since 2014, it has been collaborating with people around the world to create a global lexicon that can help us better understand our rapidly changing world.

In this Kairos one-off, cross-continental, word-making salon, Alicia and Heidi described the development of the Bureau and shared some of the words already in the lexicon (eg psychic corpus dissonanceNonnaPauraEnnuipocalypsetralfamidorification) before working with us to create more of the new words we need.

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Wednesday November 6th

Library Celebration with Drinks & Readings

We celebrated the launch of our library with an evening of drinks and shared readings from the books that have most influenced us.

We invited people to share a short reading from a book that has changed their thinking, helped clarify their understanding of this moment, or opened up new possibilities for them. Everyone was welcome to read or just come to listen and meet other bibliophiles.

A few of those readings are here.

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Monday November 4th – Friday November 8th

Special Library Opening Hours

To mark the launch of the Kairos library, we opened every day this week for anyone who wanted to come and read in our space.

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Saturday November 2nd

Screening of: “Naila and the Uprising”

Kairos took part in a day of coordinated screenings of Palestinian films around the world, Palestine Cinema Days.

We showed 2017 documentary “Naila and the Uprising” (1hr 16 mins, dir:Julia Bacha), which chronicles the remarkable journey of Naila Ayesh and a community of women whose stories weave through the nonviolent mobilisation behind the First Intifada in the late 1980s.

The screening was followed by a discussion led by Nadia Yahlom. Nadia is a Palestinian-Jewish and British artist, researcher and curator, and co-founder of Sarha Collective

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Friday November 1st

Book Club: “Orbital” by Samantha Harvey

Due to illness, we had to cancel this meeting of our Book Club. We will be rescheduling our discussion. If you’d like to join us, email events@kairos.london.

“In this slender novel, Harvey seems to have encompassed all of humanity… It is an extraordinary achievement” – The Observer

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

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Wednesday October 30th

A Peasant Revolt & A Vision for the Commons with Peter Sahlins

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 reflected 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 placed 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 invited reflections on the relevance of history to our current struggle to find equitable social responses to environmental degradation.

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Tuesday October 29th

Worlds Worth Living For with Dougald Hine

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.

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Thursday October 24th

A Warm Data Lab with Emily Stewart

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?

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Tuesday October 22nd

Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World with Ian Scoones

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 argued 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 explored themes of finance and banking, technology regulation, critical infrastructures, pandemics, natural disasters and climate change. He contrasted 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.

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Saturday October 19th

Kent Day Walk & Visit to DARES

As part of a new series exploring experiments in community building, we combined a walk through beautiful 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 took the train to Cowden (approx 1 hour from London Bridge) and hiked to DARES where we stopped for lunch and learnt more about the project. We then hiked to Hever in the afternoon and caught the train back to London. 

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Thursday October 17th

Screening of “The Square” with Nihal El Aasar

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 led a discussion on the lessons the Egyptian revolution holds for the climate and other mass movements today.

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Friday October 4th

Book Club: “At Work in the Ruins” by Dougald Hine

“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?

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Tuesday October 1st

Open Projects Night

Our regular Open Projects Night, where we learnt about each others projects, built connections and offered each other support.

Open Projects Nights are 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 followed by supper and discussion.

The next Open Projects Night will be on December 3rd.

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Wednesday September 11th

The Cost of Resistance with Chris Hedges

A SPECIAL SOLIDARITY AND FUNDRAISING EVENT IN SUPPORT OF THE WHOLE TRUTH FIVE

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges drew on his experience in conflict zones around the world to explore what we will need to do to protect our planet from ecocide. Chris spent two decades covering wars, revolutions, social upheavals, dictatorships and failed states in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans. He was Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for The New York Times. He reported on how resistance movements emerged, what tactics were successful in bringing down tyrannies and what tactics were used by regimes to destroy resistance movements.

Drawing on his intimate knowledge of resistance and repression, he detailed the methods we need to adopt to defeat the powerful interests, including the fossil fuel industry and the animal agriculture industry, which have placed their profits above the protection of our species and all other life on earth.

Chris holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard University and is the author of 14 books, including several New York Times best sellers. The Whole Truth Five are five members of Just Stop Oil who were sentenced last month to the longest ever prison sentences for non-violent protest. Roger Hallam is serving a five-year sentence, and Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin are each serving four years for their involvement in protests on the M25.

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Wednesday September 4th

Screening of “Join or Die” with Sarah Stein Lubrano

Robert Putnam is one of the last century’s most famous sociologists. His hugely influential work “Bowling Alone” has been taught across the globe. He argues that democracies are failing because of a loss of “social capital”: the social bonds of civil society and all the value they carry. His work inspired a generation of civically minded Americans to take action, and shaped the policies of the White House and beyond. Yet in the last 25 years the problem of weakening social capital has only become worse.

This newly released documentary “Join or Die” (2023, 99 mins, dir Rebecca Davis & Pete Davis) profiles Robert Putnam and his work, focusing on six community groups working to revitalise American civic life. In the film, Putnam challenges Americans to join a club or else see their democracy perish.

But if this individualistic and moralistic cry hasn’t worked before, with all the power of the American Presidency behind it, why would it work now? And what, besides joining clubs, might actually work to rebuild democratic life? Sarah Stein Lubrano, whose own work draws on and challenges Putnam’s ideas, will provide commentary on the film, before hosting a guided discussion about what we might all wish to do in an age of dangerously fraying social fabric and weakened democratic life.

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Thursday August 29th

Walking the London Martyr’s Way, a Pilgrimage with Guy Hayward

We went on a pilgrimage walk from Tower Hill to Smithfield Market, led by Guy Hayward of the British Pilgrimage Trust. We learned about the men and women who, on these familiar streets, were ready to pay the ultimate price for their beliefs: Catholics persecuted by Protestants, Protestants by Catholics, believers by non-believers, kings by invaders, and people who sacrificed their lives for others.

We walked in honour of those historic martyrs whose ends may have led to an abhorrence of persecution, and tolerance towards the expression of opposing and seemingly offensive views. We’ll visit the monuments raised to celebrate their courage, churches constructed around their memory, sculptures dedicated to self-sacrifice and sites of pilgrimage and prayer.

Much of the route, also known as “The Way of Tolerance and Strength”, follows the actual journey taken by the condemned on their way from the Tower to various places of execution, including Smithfield, where our pilgrimage ended. We then took the tube to Kairos for lunch.

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Wednesday August 28th

August Movie Nights: “Embrace of the Serpent”

As part of our August Movie Nights series, we screened “Embrace of the Serpent” (2hr 5mins, 2015) by Colombian director Ciro Guerra.

The film follows the journeys of an Amazonian shaman, the last survivor of his people, first with a German ethnographer, and forty years later with an American botanist, as they search for a sacred healing plant.

From Mark Kermode’s five star review in the Guardian: “This extraordinary, hypnotic work…seems at first glance to be a dreamy inversion of the themes of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, turning a generic heart of darkness into a crucible of light, as seen from the perspective of indigenous Amazonian tribespeople.

“Mixing fact and fiction in fable-like fashion, Guerra’s third feature (which secured Colombia’s first Oscar nomination for best foreign language film) offers both a bold indictment of colonial imperialism and a powerful celebration of disappearing cultures…Guerra’s honest, impassioned, inventive film coils itself around its audience in a transcendent cinematic embrace.”

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Wednesday August 14th

August Movie Nights: “Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000”

As part of our August Movie Nights series, we screened “Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000” (1hr 50mins, 1976) by Swiss new wave director Alain Tanner.

Set in Geneva, with a screenplay by Tanner and the English novelist and critic John Berger, the film is a “witty and cerebrally playful” portrait of eight characters – a copy editor, a rural worker, a teacher and a supermarket cashier – as they navigate the constraints of capitalism and attempt to hold onto the ideals of 1968.

With its “warm and vivid” view of its characters, “Jonas Qui Aura 25 Ans en l’An 2000” is “that rare species, a polemical comedy” (The Guardian). The film’s “gentle, unhectoring attitude to the future” (BFI) brought it international acclaim and sets it apart from other better known films of the time exploring similar territory.

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Wednesday August 7th

Sewing Club: Day-Long Drop-In

We invited people to bring along their sewing projects and join us for a day-long sewing get together. Entry was free, but donations to cover our costs were encouraged. We provided a sewing machine and some basic tools and asked people to bring their own cloth and any other materials they needed.

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Tuesday August 6th

August Movie Nights: “Neptune Frost”

As part of our August Movie Nights series we screened “Neptune Frost”, an Afrofuturist, sci-fi punk musical directed by musician Saul Williams and Rwandan-born artist and cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman.

“Neptune Frost” (2022, 1hr 50mins) takes place in the hilltops of Burundi, where a group of escaped coltan miners form an anti-colonialist computer hacker collective. From their camp in an otherworldly e-waste dump, they attempt a takeover of the authoritarian regime exploiting the region’s natural resources, and its people. When an intersex runaway and an escaped coltan miner find each other through cosmic forces, their connection sparks glitches within the greater divine circuitry.

Film-makers description: “Set between states of being – past and present, dream and waking life, colonised and free, male and female, memory and prescience – “Neptune Frost” is an invigorating and empowering direct download to the cerebral cortex and a call to reclaim technology for progressive political ends.”

From the Guardian review: “Exhilarating, dazzling inventive…a denunciation of the western techno-centric order….Conveying its indignation in oblique poetic outpourings and songs that switch freely between Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Swahili, French and English, it tirelessly calls everything into question: sexual identity, western hegemony, whether technology is a substitute for action.”

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Thursday August 1st

August Movie Nights: “This Is Not a Film” by Jafar Panahi

As part of our August Movie Nights series, we screened “This Is Not a Film” by Iranian director and pro-democracy activist Jafar Panahi (2011, 1hr 15mins). Banned from film-making for 20 years by the Iranian regime and under house arrest as he appeals a six year prison sentence, Panahi recruits a friend to film him planning the movie he should have been making.

“This Is Not a Film” is an extraordinary study in the art of cinema, creativity in resistance and defiance against repression. It was first shown at the 2011 Cannes Festival after being smuggled out of Iran in a cake.

After the screening we ate supper together and informally discussed the film.

Read the Guardian’s five star review.

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Friday July 26th

Book Club: “Pod” by Laline Paull

“Laline Paull succeeds splendidly in rising to the most important literary challenge of our time – restoring voice and agency to other-than-human beings” – Amitav Ghosh

For our July book club we read “Pod” by Laline Paull.

Publisher’s description: Laline Paull returns with an immersive and transformative new novel of an ocean world—its extraordinary creatures, mysteries, and mythologies—that is increasingly haunted by the cruelty and ignorance of the human race.

Ea has always felt like an outsider. As a spinner dolphin who has recently come of age, she’s now expected to join in the elaborate rituals that unite her pod. But Ea suffers from a type of deafness that prevents her from mastering the art of spinning. When catastrophe befalls her family and Ea knows she is partly to blame, she decides to make the ultimate sacrifice and leave the pod.

As Ea ventures into the vast, she discovers dangers everywhere, from lurking predators to strange objects floating in the water. Not to mention the ocean itself seems to be changing; creatures are mutating, demonic noises pierce the depths, whole species of fish disappear into the sky above. Just as she is coming to terms with her solitude, a chance encounter with a group of arrogant bottlenoses will irrevocably alter the course of her life.

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Tuesday July 23rd

Cognitive Dissonance: Living in a World of Contradictions with Sarah Stein Lubrano

Why do people believe false or harmful things about the political and social world, even when faced with a wealth of evidence to the contrary? Why is this kind of thinking especially prevalent in the world of politics? And what does it do to all of us, psychically, when we are structurally set up to live in a world of contradictions?

Cognitive dissonance refers to the discomfort we feel when we notice a contradiction between two or more of our beliefs or actions, even unconsciously. If you fly on planes or eat animals even when aware of the negative consequences, you have experienced dissonance firsthand. In talk and discussion, researcher Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano (University of Oxford, the Sense and Solidarity Initiative, Future Narratives Lab) presented her research on dissonance and political thought and outlined how this line of research helps us understand some of the recent “bonkers”-ness of our current political moment.

She shared about the history of dissonance theory as it was “discovered” in an apocalyptic alien cult, the reasons dissonance is more common in political areas, and techniques that can sometimes help people navigate dissonance with greater cognitive flexibility. Together, we discussed ways that ideological beliefs and behaviours “make use” of dissonance and what this means both for trying to persuade those caught in harmful ideologies and in crafting our own political movements and messages.

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Tuesday July 16th

Planetarity: Some Tools for Thinking About the Earth with Tim Waterman

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, presented some new tools to help us reimagine “planetarity”: earthliness, worldliness, and globality. His talk took 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 also discussed 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 offered 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.

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Saturday July 13th

Everyday Democracy Workshop with Sophie Scott-Brown & Pippa Evans

Democracy is the art of dealing with difference – but how often have you been stuck in a meeting, an argument, a class, a workplace where everyone just wants their way and no one is listening?

In this free, day-long workshop, chaired by historian and philosopher of radical democratic practice, Sophie Scott-Brown, with improvisation artist Pippa Evans, we explored how to transform conflict into social creativity.

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Thursday July 11th

History for Tomorrow with Roman Krznaric

‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past’ – Māori proverb

As humanity faces a future of uncertainty, we would be wise to look backwards as we seek to chart a way forwards. What can history teach us about the power of rebellion to tackle the climate and nature crisis? How might understanding the origins of capitalism spark ideas for bringing AI under control? What could we learn from eighteenth century Japan for creating regenerative economies today, or from Europe’s forgotten Islamic kingdom for nurturing cultures of tolerance?

In this talk, based around his new book History for Tomorrow: Inspiration from the Past for the Future of Humanity (and also drawing on ideas from his previous book The Good Ancestor), Roman Krznaric, social philosopher and Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, offered some fascinating insights from the last 1000 years of world history that could help us confront the most urgent challenges of the twenty-first century.

Roman showed how, time and again, societies have risen up, often against the odds, to overcome crises and fight injustices. History offers a vision of radical hope that could turn out to be our most vital tool for surviving and thriving in the turbulent decades ahead.

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Friday July 5th – Sunday July 7th

Kairos at the Idler Festival

Kairos was at The Idler Festival, at Fenton House, Hampstead, providing conversation, free vegan biscuits, things to make and books to read.

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Wednesday July 3rd

Screening of “The Grab”

“The big story of the 21st century: Is this the most shocking documentary of the year?” – Guardian review

National governments, financial investors and private security forces are covertly taking control of the world’s food and water resources in anticipation of future climate shocks. We screened newly released documentary “The Grab”  (1hr 42mins, dir:Gabriela Cowperthwaite) which follows investigative journalist Nate Halverson over a six year period as he uncovers the pattern, from Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of aquifers in Arizona, to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the displacement of Zambian farmers by private security firms.

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