Prefiguring Emergent Futures in Learning Practice

In the first days of September 2023, the Greek village of Kalentzi, tucked amongst the warm hills of the Epirus region of Greece, bore witness to a singular gathering: the Life after Growth summer school, a meeting of scholars, researchers, artists and practitioners united by the common task of imagining worlds no longer dominated by regimes of forced economic growth.

Original publication from the handbook "Driving Design II: Collective approaches enriching design principles: https://distributeddesign.eu/driving-design-volume-ii (external link) (pp. 58-63).

The summer school was put on by prominent researchers of theories of commons and degrowth from the P2P Lab of Tallinn University of Technology, the Post-Growth Innovation Lab of the University of Vigo, and the Department of Social Policy of Democritus University of Thrace and with the participation of the local organisations Wind Empowerment, Habibi.Works, High Mountains, Tzoumakers and Commonen.

For four days, the twenty-odd participants of the summer school took part in participatory lessons on a variety of themes, from the experience of time under capitalism to a reimagining of such basic terms as “needs,” “wants,” and “value.” We also spent the afternoons of the workshop engaged in collaborative activities with the local initiatives from Epirus.

While the summer school may have appeared spontaneous to those who participated, it was the fruit of long planning and deep collaboration amongst a wide network of organisations and researchers. The presence of the Tzoumakers collaborative makerspace in the centre of Kalentzi made the village a natural choice, as the participants became connected to the traces and continuing presence of an alternative community initiative which neatly crystallised the values of the workshop: the creation of grassroots common initiatives as alternatives to existing models of development and economic growth. This utopian project was balanced by the deep presence of the past: Kalentzi is a place which carries and manifests its past tenses, from the Old School where the workshops took place to the Platanos taverna where we ate lunch every day. This unique setting, rooting us in the past while pulling us towards the future, contributed to the feeling of finding ourselves in a foreign and at the same time familiar place as we discussed and learned together.

The two of us, Maria and Leo - an architect from Thessaloniki and an anthropologist from Utah, respectively - were participants and roommates at the summer school. When we decided to set out and write about the experience, we quickly converged on a common idea: the way in which the summer school, while presenting the task of creating shared futures as the content of its lessons, itself enacted this process through the very form of the school itself. From the way lessons were taught to the organisation of time and even the way that decision-making processes themselves were taken in common, the summer school presented a rare and transformative experience: the chance to feel what living in a post-growth world, together, might be like.

In what follows, we discuss three dimensions in which this took place: three ways in which content and form were intertwined in the creation of a unique and prefigurative educational process. By turning theoretical descriptions into lived experience, the summer school showed what the concrete practice of degrowth can look like playing, thinking, and dreaming about the future through critical reflection on the point of a past-inflected present.

Off the clock: time in common(s)

On the morning of the school’s third day, facilitator Maro Pantozidou taught a lesson on time. Building on her doctoral research on the experience of time amongst precarious gig workers and alternative social collectives, Maro pushed us to consider the ways in which time is not a neutral physical quality but rather socially co-constructed, lived and felt differently according to our shared beliefs and practices, and shaped intimately by the social and economic formations we inhabit.

The lesson began, not with citations and theory, but rather with twenty minutes in which we could do whatever we wanted. Some of us did yoga stretches on the steps of the school’s amphitheatre or sat in silent meditation, while others sketched the landscape, chatted over a coffee, or stretched out for a catnap beneath the morning sun. While Maro kept a timer, most of us lost track of time.

Returning to the classroom after the exercise, we reflected on how qualitatively different those minutes had felt - how liberating to be given time outside the demands of productivity and stresses of a packed schedule. The lecture went on to deconstruct those very demands through an analysis of temporal power: the ways in which our temporal lives are shaped by the clock of capitalism. What would it be like, Maro asked, to live time in a different way - to experience time not as an ever-scarce commodity but as a kind of commons, shaped by the qualities of abundance and conviviality?

Yet we had been learning, first-hand, a kind of answer to that question - not only during those twenty minutes gifted at the beginning of Maro’s lesson, but throughout the entire week. The organisation of time in the summer school was marked by a remarkably convivial flexibility. While the school’s pre-distributed schedule reported that activities began at 9:00 AM sharp, usually by 9:15 we were still sitting on the stairs of Kalentzi’s Old School, enjoying our last sips of coffee and bites of Greek pastry. The morning lesson was followed by a four-hour lunch break, from 1 to 5 PM each day. Of these four hours, we usually spent two eating lunch together in the village taverna, and another two in unstructured exploration: wandering Kalentzi on foot, hiking to explore the nearby gorges and waterfalls, or simply returning to one’s room and taking a much-needed nap.

What was remarkable was the way that, despite initial clock-based anxieties, this flexibility never detracted from the “productivity” of the learning experience, but instead enhanced it. If we spent 15 minutes extra sharing a coffee in the morning, this was more than compensated by the sense of full absorption we felt during the lessons, each of us losing track of time as we engaged with each day’s materials. Likewise, the amount of unstructured time given during our lunch break gave us the chance to really get to know each other, while the opportunity to rest meant that, when we returned at 5 (or 5:15) for the afternoon workshops, we felt fully refreshed and excited to engage with the local initiatives. We all had enough time to reflect on what we had been learning, both individually and collectively.

There was a design lesson here. While the clock time of capitalist labour (and learning) might view such a schedule as slack or unpunctual, there was nothing unrigorous about the school’s organisation: it was rather a conscious choice to share a different kind of time together. That choice deepened and enriched our learning far more than a tightly constricted program would have.

At the end of the summer school, it felt impossible that everything we had learned had been squeezed into only four days. It likewise felt impossible that our fellow participants, who now felt more like close friends, had been strangers a mere four days ago. Echoing Maro’s lecture, these magic tricks of time defied our dominant temporal assumptions. While regimes of economic growth favour a conception of time as scarce, linear, ever-accelerating or shattered and lonely –and the texture of our everyday lives under capitalism only reaffirms this– theories of degrowth make room for something different. Time is perceived as relational, flexible and abundant. The schedule of the summer school showed what this alternative could look and feel like; and if the pace of the school felt luxurious at first, it gradually pushed us to imagine a different world: one in which slowness, depth and flexibility of time might not be luxuries at all, but common goods.

Participatory education: learning in common(s)

Degrowth calls us to perceive the interdependence of humans as individuals, collectives, and members of a larger ecology. This interdependence implies a state of vulnerability and partiality in all of us. Degrowth theories are comfortable with participation and shared initiative and leave room for the collective creation of meaning and content.

We participants were not involved in the planning which preceded our arrival in Kalentzi. Yet from the school’s first meeting, it seemed that the responsibility for creating meanings and values was shared among all of us, not only the facilitators

The participatory nature of the school was reflected in the collaborative creation and flow of discussions. With the participation of all of us, the content was constantly changed, the knowledge that each one of us had in their head give birth to its multiple copies. The moderators structured a plan so that the discussion was out of their complete control. They requested our participation as well as the people of the initiatives in the production of the content.

Characteristically, facilitator Sofia Adam’s lecture on degrowth discourse and theories of needs was re-shaped by our own interventions. In her lesson, she had carefully curated to raise questions which were at once theoretical and experiential. Sophia, initially referring to the history of the concept of degrowth, spoke about how the degrowth movement has often, in its attempt to determine how capitalism as a dominant system constructs our world, separated needs from wants, the necessary from the superfluous, the intrinsic from the prosthetic. But are there basic needs? Are some needs more important than others? Do we all have the same needs? How is "need" determined in a system that constantly cultivates new classifications and divisions? In raising such disorienting questions - how do we really tell a want from a need? - Sofia did not simply impose her own answers. Rather, she divided us in small groups to develop our ideas, our own classifications of wants and needs, in collective conversations that were often animated by lively disagreements. Thus, a rethinking of our basic categories of “wants” and “needs” became a participatory process, and this participation forced us to see those very concepts in a whole new light.

Indeed, throughout the summer school, many needs and wants were met which often go neglected in educational settings. For example, the need for embodied movement: although discourse and dialogue had a dominant role in the summer school experience, there were also important moments where our participation was expressed nonverbally, without that means that embodied participation is an absolute distinct situation from discussion as speech presupposes and constitutes constantly the body.

Every morning the lesson started with the call to assembly in the school yard. There we spent some time standing in a circle, with our bodies facing the centre of it, trying out movement exercises and games under the guidance of facilitators Alicia Trepat Pont, Maro Pantazidou or participants like Abby and Suzanne, who responded to the moderators' invitation to test our own ideas. The pace and type of exercises that Alicia and Maro coordinated were experimental so that there was room for appropriation and variation. This created the mood to creatively transform the exercise and imagine a new one. Each exercise was determined by our presence and looks. There was no optimal way to move or stop, you didn't feel like there was a winner and a loser.

In these ways, our participation formed new values. What we learned correlated with what we experienced. And because we participated in the production of meaning, verbally or not, our experiences were captured in the content of the school and became shared knowledge. We found a symbol for this in a large ball of red thread, brought by one of the facilitators, which was constantly put to different uses throughout the week. In one striking activity, we stood in a large circle and took turns saying one question we had about the day’s activities. Each person held onto the thread as it passed to the next, so that as our questions and curiosities accumulated, we found ourselves gradually woven ourselves into a kind of large dreamcatcher.

De-automated process: designing in common(s)

An automated process perceives anything unpredictable as a deviation or an accident, a risk to production. Constantly trying to study all the available parameters, automation seeks, even if it does not always achieve, full control or anticipation of contingencies. Such automation - from factory lines and UberEats algorithms to construction protocols and knowledge alienation - is the invisible basis for regimes of enforced economic growth. It also increasingly shapes the paradox between our controlled, risk-free lives and the precariousness to which we are constantly exposed.

In their opening lecture “On Growth and the Meaning of Life,” Alex Pazaitis and Ben Robra talked about the discomfort that stems from the paradox of rapid, increasingly automated economic growth and simultaneous environmental degradation and social inequality. In order to survive this contradiction, philosophies of degrowth approach the creation of different value systems.

Yet during the 4 days of participating in the summer school and staying in Kalentzi, we created our own values, in distance from the automated and familiar rhythm that determines most of our daily activities. Our bodies and minds de-automated and interrupted their usual behaviour. The form of the summer school itself was determined by the coexistence between us as well as with the place, a particularly unpredictable and contingent condition.

Lack of full control can mean risk or even opportunity. At the summer school, this unpredictability seemed. to be by design. Inviting a diverse assemblage of individuals to coexist in a remote Greek village for four days is far from a recipe for assured, automatic success. But in inviting us to participate in a process radically open to contingencies, the summer school taught us a different framework: to view contingency, with its risks and opportunities, as an integral element of design in a world which necessarily evades our full control.

As a field of coexistence between individuals from different scientific subjects and professional paths, from different geographic and social backgrounds and even different ages, the school was designed to provide the space and time to get to know each other and live together for a while. This process of relating across differences itself contains risks. Yet what emerged was a beautiful relativity of individual experience, a different rhythm. The dependence of one person on the other, both in practical matters and in the creation of values and meanings and our coexistence with the landscape and climate: this all reminded us that we are always imperfect, supplemented by situations outside of ourselves, constantly exposed to the human, physical or technical field that surrounds us. The summer school invited us into this coexistence and made us comfortable with this exposure to one another. The organisers felt comfortable leaving fluid times and gaps in the process so that we could appropriate parts of it. It was this openness to possibility that perhaps signalled the de-automation we felt and exercised.

Meanwhile, within the classroom, degrowth itself was discussed as a non-definitive concept with multiple meanings and uses. Space was left for the appropriation of the concept and the questioning of what growth or degrowth is for each of us. The summer school promoted the idea that theoretical currents are here to be studied and assimilated while caring about lived experience. This approach, permeating the entire educational process, defined something new and different. How is it possible to think beyond development without transforming the tools and educational processes through which knowledge is shared? Even if the school did not want to offer a clear answer on what life after growth could be, the ways and options that were revealed were multiple and emergent, never dictated from above.

Through our vulnerable exposure to rain and mud, to complex and unfinished theoretical discussions, and to each other, the summer school taught what a de-automated learning process can feel like: risky and uncertain but also rich and exciting, filled with singular opportunities. In a world where full control appears less and less likely (if it were ever possible), the art of designing in organic, responsible, flexibly structured ways appears more important than ever. While, by definition, this art can never be reduced to a single blueprint, the designers of the summer school, in skillfully befriending contingency and openness, gave us one vivid example.

Conclusion: for the knowing of this world, and the making of new worlds

In theories of commons and degrowth, the future is not perceived as a situation absolutely distinct from the present and the past. Rather it lies hidden, waiting to be discovered, in the sedimentations of the past and the possibilities of the present. At the Life after Growth summer school, gathered in an ancient village, huddled beside strangers, we did not only rejoice and relax: we also shared our anxieties, our intense worries about the future. Yet by critically and collectively analysing our own historical era, we felt less confused and alone. And in the fleeting creation of a utopian present - one rich in time, collaborative in design, and joyously improvisatory - we were able to touch, briefly, the concrete image of an alternative future. A better- designed future.

The present condition can accommodate moments that overcome the contradictions and impasses of the contemporary situation. As a moment of suspension, located at the margins of our repetitive obligations and habits of learning, thinking, and doing, the Life after Growth summer school was such a moment. However spatially and temporally delimited the school experience was, it spread like a red thread across the different geographies we inhabit and into our lives afterwards. Writing this review was a testament to our willingness to stick together, experiment and create together. The possibility of another world might just be connected to the future of the relationships we build.