Discussing Degrowth and/as Care Work

In this seminar I would like to discuss the challenge of degrowth culture. Discussions of degrowth tend to focus on economics, with reference to global scales. The question of how degrowth would work at the scale of a local community is less discussed. What would the values, shared meanings, daily or yearly practices of a degrowth community look like? How would people live--and find value in living--in a degrowth society? 

I believe that "care" provides one important answer to these questions. Care provides a lens that focuses the experience and practice of value, as well as certain kinds of economic and social activity (as in "care work"). It answers questions that are left out of more abstract degrowth theorizing, like "what will people do all day?" while also addressing aspects of human experience--particularly relating to vulnerability and death--that are abjected in capitalist economic and cultural systems. 

I am interested in discussing care's generative potential, as something that individuals can readily imagine taking shape in their own mindset and familiar context, while also something available to articulation at larger scales, in terms of social, political, maybe even national values. Finally, I'd like to discuss the commonality I see between care and peace: enablers of human flourishing which, we are told, are never possible even though the tools to achieve them are always right at hand.

Readings

Required: Kohei Saito's Slow Down (translated by Brian Bergstrom, 2024), Chapters 6, 7, and 8.

Recommended:  The Care Collective's The Care Manifesto (2020).

Series convened by Olivier Krischer and Yvonne Low, co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.