Past Events at Kairos
Friday May 16th 2025
What Narratives are Needed in These Turbulent Times? with Marshall Ganz
At a time when democracies face unprecedented challenges and far-right sentiments are on the rise, Harvard Professor Marshall Ganz offers a powerful framework for democratic renewal.
Drawing on decades of organising experience, Marshall’s groundbreaking approach to public narrative — connecting personal stories of self, us, and now — can help us overcome fear, reclaim our agency, and strengthen our communities.
The afternoon – a special participatory even aimed at activists, organisers and communicators – began with a presentation from Marshall followed by smaller group discussion. We then came back together to collectively explore the deeper stories we need to tell.
This event was a collaboration with UAL’s AKO Storytelling Institute, which supports creatives at the intersection of storytelling and social impact; and Act Build Change, which trains collectives to grow teams, build power, and win change.
Thursday May 15th 2025
Transcending the Alt Reich in an Age of Collapse and Renewal with Nafeez Ahmed
The far-right is resurgent. The United States has been taken over by a technology oligarchy with an alarming technofascist agenda to supercharge hyper-capitalism and fracture democracies.
In this interactive talk and discussion session, author, systems theorist and journalist Nafeez Ahmed drew on his transdisciplinary research into what he calls “the planetary phase shift” to help us make sense of this dangerous moment, and create strategies for action.
For as well as an unprecedented convergence of ecological, energy, food and economic crises, there is also an unprecedented possibility space emerging for the radical transformation of the systems that define civilisation.
Nafeez discussed the findings of his new book, “Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within”, and argued that understanding the nature of the ideology of the far-right through a systems lens can help us recognise strategies to defeat it through systemic transformation. He showed how the Alt Reich is an effort to head off the emancipatory possibilities of system changes that are occurring right now across society, culture and technology.
Wednesday May 14th 2025
The Fashion Commons: Reclaiming Our Clothing Culture
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 came 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 heard 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 addressed 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 then broke into small groups to discuss how we might begin to make these paradigm shifts. Collectively, we then discussed 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 was required – either of the Commons generally or fashion cultures specifically. All are welcome to contribute or just come to listen.
Tuesday April 29th 2025
The Good Apocalypse Guide with Alex Evans
We have apocalypses all wrong. They can be much more hopeful, creative, empowering, energising and fruitful than the gloomy stories of collapse that we keep hearing about.
Hollywood tells us (incessantly) that apocalypses are catastrophes, plain and simple. Only rugged individuals survive. How to cope? Stock up on canned food and ammo.
Real apocalypses are much more interesting than that. Yes, they’re moments of extreme turbulence – but they can also be incubators for new futures, that bring out the best of us like nothing else. And while they can certainly lead to catastrophic breakdowns, they can also be times of extraordinary breakthrough.
So what tips the balance? In this talk, Alex Evans – founder and executive director of Larger Us and author of the The Good Apocalypse Guide on Substack – explored how our ancestors made sense of moments of cataclysm, why our mental and emotional states are so central to the kind of future we’ll inhabit, and why the ‘religion shaped hole’ in modern life matters most during apocalyptic times.
Wednesday April 23rd 2025
Kill the Corporation Before it Kills Us
The profit-making corporation is almost perfectly designed for the purpose of using up the world’s resources as quickly as possible, and then taking no responsibility for cleaning up the damage.
In this talk, David Whyte, Professor of Climate Justice at Queen Mary’s University, analysed the political and legal foundations of the corporation – the organisation that was created as a device of European colonialism – to show exactly why it is the deadliest human invention.
David argued that our best chance of survival is to understand the foundations of corporate power and set out the steps we need to take to fatally weaken the corporation. We need to kill the corporation and replace it with organisations that promote common ownership. Only then can we work towards surviving climate breakdown.
Tuesday April 15th 2025
Rooted Innovation: The Future of Technology with Joycelyn Longdon
What does the future of technology look like amidst ecological and cultural breakdown? How we might come to see technology as a generational practice of craft, learning from those who have come before us, and those whose technologies are grounded in reciprocal relationships with the environment, in order to build the worlds of the future?
Joycelyn Longdon, environmental justice technologist, author, educator and PhD Candidate at the University of Cambridge, will explore the histories and possibilities of technology beyond a Western industrialist view, beyond silver bullets and panacean solutions, towards an appreciation of the many forms of technology, old and new, material and cultural and the technologies nature itself designs.
Joycelyn’s research focuses on the design of justice-led conservation technologies for monitoring of biodiversity with local forest communities in Ghana. Her debut book, “Natural Connection: What Indigenous Wisdom and Marginalised People Teach us about Environmental Action” was published in April 2025.
Wednesday April 9th 2025
Book Club: “Hospicing Modernity” by Vanessa Andreotti
“There are clues [here] to how we find the paths that lead to the unknown world ahead, beyond the end of the world as we know it.” — Dougald Hine
For our April Book Club we discussed “Hospicing Modernity” by Vanessa Andreotti (aka Vanessa Machado de Oliveira).
“Vanessa presents us with a challenge: to grow up, step up, and show up for ourselves, our communities, and the living Earth, and to interrupt the modern behaviour patterns that are killing the planet we’re part of.
Driven by expansion, colonialism, and resource extraction and propelled by neoliberalism and rabid consumption, our world is profoundly out of balance…But instead of drowning in hopelessness, how can we learn to face our reality with humility and accountability?
Vanessa breaks down archetypes of cognitive dissonance…and asks us to dig deeper and exist differently. She explains how our habits, behaviours, and belief systems hold us back – and why it’s time now to gradually disinvest.” (Publisher’s description.)
Saturday April 5th 2025
Concerts Don’t Cost the Earth with Gibbon and Goldfinch
Following Gibbon & Goldfinch’s knock out appearance at our Winter Solstice Party, they were back at Kairos with Concerts Don’t Cost the Earth, a unique musical experience to move, motivate and inspire.
Gibbon & Goldfinch – aka performing duo Marcus Decker and Holly Cullen-Davies, who met running protest song workshops – are singers, multi-instrumentalists, activists, curators and entertainers.
For this concert, the first at Kairos since we acquired our own piano, Marcus and Holly performed a range of pieces from J.S. Bach to Nina Simone and Claude Debussy to Joni Mitchell.
Concerts Don’t Cost the Earth brings together musicians, hosts and audiences in convivial settings where everyone is included. They offer the chance to be surprised, to laugh and possibly cry, to learn something new and to make new friends.
Thursday April 3rd 2025
How We Live and How We Might Live with Ken Worpole
How can we move from communities of interest to communities of care?
In his 1964 essay, “Urban Place and the Non-Place Public Realm”, American urban designer Melvin Webber coined a phrase which anticipated the changing nature of social life in the modern world: community without propinquity. This suggested that the communities of the future would be based more on shared interests and identities than physical proximity and face-to-face encounters. Webber predicted this long before the Internet made the creation of online ‘communities’ – whose reach now extends across the globe – even more commanding.
Today social media generates millions of such self-described ‘communities’, none of whose members have ever met in person. In such conditions, social change becomes ever more difficult to achieve, for as John Stuart Mill argued in “Principles of Political Economy” (1848), society needs ‘experiments in living’ – new forms of working and living together – to guard against ‘the weight of Custom bearing down upon human capacity for improvement.’
In his recent books, New Jerusalem: The Good City and the Good Society (2017), No Matter How Many Skies Have Fallen: back to the land in wartime Britain (2021), and Brightening from the East: Essays on landscape & memory (2025), writer and social historian Ken Worpole explores the post-war history of such experiments in living and working together, now commonly called elective or ‘intentional’ communities.
In this talk, Ken highlighted four remarkable case studies he knows well – one environmental, one pacifist, one religious in origin but open to all, and one a newly opened experiment in social care – and discussed what we might learn from them as we face the environmental and social upheavals of tomorrow.
Tuesday April 1st 2025
Open Projects Night
We held our bi-monthly open mike night, where we learned 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.
Thursday March 27th 2025
Ecological Medicine: Healing the People, Healing the Planet with Jenny Goodman
In this talk, followed by discussion, Jenny Goodman, qualified medical doctor and author of “Getting Healthy in Toxic Times”, set out a vision for a new way to heal ourselves and the planet.
Ecological Medicine looks for the root causes of illness, especially the causes of our current waves of chronic, degenerative diseases; our epidemics of dementia, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative and autoimmune disease, all of which were rare or unknown before the industrial revolution – and all of which are preventable.
Crucially, ecological medicine sees the human being as an intrinsic part of the wider ecosystem which is Planet Earth; we cannot heal the one in isolation from the other.
Reclaiming control over our own health is a profoundly political act.
Tuesday March 25th 2025
This Is an Act of Care with Tim Jackson
Care is the foundation of organic life. But its fate in society is precarious and uncertain. Care work is arduous and underpaid. Yet without it, health and vitality are impossible. Care itself ends up leading a curious dual life. In our hearts it’s honoured as an irreducible good. But in the market it’s treated as a second class citizen – barely recognised in the relentless rush for productivity and wealth. How did we arrive at this dysfunctional place? And what can we do to change things?
In this talk, Tim Jackson, ecological economist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Surrey and author of The Care Economy asked what it would take to position care as a central organising principle in economic life.
He journeyed through the history of medicine, the economics of capitalism and the philosophical underpinnings of health. He explored the gender politics of care, revisited the birthplace of a universal dream and confronted the demons that prevent us from realising it.
He also described some of the struggles he encountered in writing The Care Economy, his manifesto for a healthier and more humane society, and asked what it would mean to take health seriously as a societal goal.
Tuesday March 18th 2025
Reviving the Blue Commons: A Plan to Repair Our Ocean
As part of our year-long series on the Commons, we came 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 explored how to reinstate the ocean as a Commons. Economist Guy Standing outlined the necessary laws and governing mechanisms needed to revive the Blue Commons. Political theorist Chris Armstrong advocated for Blue Justice: The ocean is a more-than-human space, so whose Commons is it? Social movement scholar Antje Scharenberg explored Blue Activism, asking what kind of ocean democracy we can hope for. And Tobias Troll from NGO Seas at Risk explained the concept of the Blue Doughnut: How can we care for the ocean and look after ourselves?
Collectively, we then discussed 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 was required – either of the Commons generally or ocean issues specifically. All were welcome to contribute or just come to listen.
Thursday March 13th 2025
We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For with Adam Greenfield
How can we hold our own against the Long Emergency?
We have together entered an epoch in which not merely the raw fact of climate-system collapse, but the second- and third-order consequences of that unfolding, threaten to undo the infrastructural, economic, political, social and even psychological systems that undergird everyday experience: a Long Emergency with radically uncertain prospects for the sustainment of any life we recognise, and no clear end in sight.
In this talk, based on his 2024 book Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World On Fire, Adam Greenfield explored ways in which we might organise ourselves to not merely survive this Long Emergency, but to do so in ways that uphold our fundamental commitments to dignity and justice.
He drew on lessons learned from a number of communities that have faced down existentially hard times before, from the “survival programs” of the Black Panthers in the 1970s to the self-organised Occupy Sandy mutual-aid initiative, the solidarity networks of Crisis-era Greece and the large-scale, non-state society of Rojava.
He described how participants in all of these efforts experienced an expanded sense of possibility, purpose, and their own power; explored the reciprocal relationship between that power and the provision of mutual care; and finally weaved these threads together in the book’s culminating proposition: that we establish a network of the neighbourhood-based, self-organised and self-sustaining relief and recovery hubs called Lifehouses.
Tuesday March 11th 2025
Screening of “My Octopus Teacher” with Bel Jacobs
My Octopus Teacher (2020, 1hr, 25mins) tells the story of filmmaker Craig Foster who, over the course of a year, gets to know a female octopus in the waters off South Africa while working through his emotional crisis. The film, directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, won multiple awards, including an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
After the screening and a break for supper, we talked about the relationship at the heart of the film and how we all might begin to reconnect with the rest our more-than-human kin. Bel Jacobs, founder of the Empathy Project, loosely guided the discussion.
Wednesday March 5th 2025
Britain’s Common Land: Past, Present & Future with Helen Baczkowska
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 explored 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.
Thursday February 27th 2025
Revisiting Radical Ideas Past: An Evening of Shared Readings
We held an evening of shared readings from the works of visionary past thinkers. We asked, which radical ideas from the past should we revisit to help us understand and respond to this current moment? All were invited to propose a short reading or just come along to listen.
Figures we had in mind included William Blake, Ivan Illich, Donella Meadows, Alfred North Whitehead, bell hooks, Raymond Williams, John Berger, Fritjof Capra and Agnes Heller, among others. What we heard were readings from Doreen Massey, Peter Kropotkin, William Godwin and Dorothy Smith.
If you were unable to attend but have suggestions for other past thinkers we’d love to hear from you via events@kairos.london. Do let us know if there are any written works in particular you think we should include in our library collection.
Thursday February 20th 2025
Learning from Conservative Media: How to Counter Anti-Climate Messaging with Geoff Dembicki
Why are anti-climate messages resonating at a time when extreme weather disasters are escalating and solutions to the crisis have never been stronger? What can people who care deeply about a liveable planet do to counter their influence?
Canadian investigative journalist Geoff Dembicki drew on his years of reporting on conservative media to reveal how fossil fuel companies and their political allies are successfully spreading skepticism about climate solutions by linking those solutions to issues including abortion, free speech, diversity initiatives and high housing costs.
He shared insights from growing up in working-class resource towns to explain how communities on the front-lines of oil and gas extraction are more open to transformative climate action than it might initially appear. The talk, which was followed by plenty of time for discussion, covered questions of social status and narrative that go to the heart of how we understand and communicate the climate crisis.
Tuesday February 18th 2025
Bioregions & the Commons: Becoming Citizens of Place in a Changing World with Isabel Carlisle
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, explored 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 described the establishment of bioregioning in places as far apart as Costa Rica, the Arctic and Cascadia in Western North America. She detailed 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 argued that bioregions and bioregioning could help us gain the agency we need to start shaping our future.
Wednesday February 12th 2025
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.
Tuesday February 4th 2025
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.
Tuesday January 28th 2025
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.
Thursday January 23rd 2025
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.
Thursday January 16th 2025
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.
Wednesday January 8th 2025
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.
Friday January 3rd 2025
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.
