Alban Krashi

Great Britain

River Dôn

The Maison Rousseau et Littératures is seeking projects that question the social contract in light of contemporary emergencies. We at the River Dôn Project – a multi-disciplinary partnership with several world-leading organisations (Arts Catalyst, Dark Matter Labs, Don Catchment Rivers Trust, Lawyers for Nature, Sheffield Data, Sheffield Hallam University, South Yorkshire Sustainability Centre, Transforming and Activating Places, and Urban Flows Observatory) recognise the requirement for a reconfiguration of the social contract.

Humanity is facing a complex entanglement of economic, social, environmental, and health crises, and the coming decade will be oriented by our collective ability to face up to the gravity of our transitions as a species. We are required at a moment like this to reflect deeply on the worldviews and civic frameworks that have brought us to this point and to navigate the practicality, imagination, and urgency of the transitions required. The transition will require a new social contract which accounts for and is entangled with our interdependence with the natural systems that sustain us.

Climate breakdown and biodiversity loss are symptoms of deeper problems which find their root in our current worldview of separation from the ecological systems upon which we are dependent. Corresponding with this is our current inability to account for externalities and long-term risks in our economic, political, and civic infrastructures.

Increasingly, places, municipalities, and critical commons such as waterways, mountains, and meadows are at the vanguard of facing the cascading crises. They are the locations where the energy crisis becomes a health crisis, and where the health crisis becomes a social, ecological, and economic crisis. These places are also at the intersection of the abitily to demonstrate the multiple and intersecting transitions required of civilisation over the next two decades.

The River Don, as a place in which the compounding challenges we face intersect, is perfectly situated. The river runs for 111 kilometres, and its tributaries span all four local authority areas in South Yorkshire, UK. Its catchment area and its relational impact with the region spans almost 1,700 square kilometres, making it an excellent case study for this work.

Aims:

To establish the River Dôn Project’s multi-disciplinary ecology of regional and international organisations and actors.

To develop a river health engagement and interface for care platform informed by a network of river sensors acting as the foundation for hosting multi-disciplinary interventions and learning, illustrating our relational interdependence with the River Don.

Through a range of asset-based community development as well as arts and culture approaches and interventions, to co-create river-rights declaration and stewardship agreements for the River Don with communities and citizens across the catchment area while, in parallel, increasing data points on the engagement platform through citizen-science interventions.

To establish and support a network of existing civil society organisations and citizens with the aim of converting a co-created river rights declaration into a bye-law proposal (or equivalent) and to campaign successfully to pass this as a bye-law across all four authorities in South Yorkshire, catalysing new institutional capabilities.

To deploy new multi-agent legal, economic, stewardship, and governance frameworks to innovatively demonstrate the future rights, shifts in ontologies, new civic infrastructures, and multi-agencies of the River Don – unlocking new approaches to addressing polycrisis and climate breakdown.

How?

Achieving the conditions to model and experiment with new forms of multi-stakeholder governance and sovereignty in critical commons such as the River Don requires a woven, multi-disciplinary approach spanning a range of collaborative social, economic, legal, and political interventions in which our partnership has the networks and capabilities to deliver.

In brief, we will create the social and political conditions to engage with modelling through a combination of asset-based community development approaches, arts and cultural interventions, movement building, and a data-led AI- and machine-learning-informed river health engagement platform (an interface of care), which articulates the voice of the river in issuing stewardship contracts to form the foundation of new social contracts between citizens and nature.

Design Parameters:

Self-sovereign agent-entity
Interface for care (AI & Stewardship)
Asset-based community development
Many-to-many governance
River Health Engagement platforms
River rights declarations
Local authority byelaws
Relational accounting registries
Relational balance sheets
Relational identity systems
Stewardship innovation: many-to-many & more-than-human agreements
Legal personhood
Generative inquiry

Imagine:

It is 2026, and the establishment of an extensive internet-of-things sensor network, combined with citizen science projects, campaigning, arts and cultural interventions, and asset-based community development, has created the first ever real-time interface between the River Don and organisations, communities, and citizens in its catchment area.

Hosted on a web platform and mobile app, this machine-learning- and AI-facilitated interface articulates the voice of the river via a distributed chatbot mechanism which is hosted in multiple civic spaces across the catchment area. The platform and interface are informed by a range of quantitative and qualitative datasets sourced from people, communities, citizen juries, and research interventions. This data is framed around river rights, river health, and care, and continually augments the river’s voicer and ability and interact with people and communities on issues around its own health and agency within the environmental, social, and political ecology of its catchment area.

Hearing the voice of the river nurtures the opportunity for hundreds of unique stewardship relationships to emerge with citizens and organisations in the catchment area, thus further nurturing the ontological shift from one of separation to one of mutuality with nature that is required of humans over the next decade. For the first time in the Global North, this enables an interface and experience of this mutuality and interdependence, which is both context- and place-driven, as well as proportionate to the scale of change and the challenge.

Achieving this catalyses the innovation space for new multi-agent governance, legal and economic frameworks between private, public, and civic spaces, which are informed by new material and relational balance sheets, stewardship models, and legal instruments, accounting for the externalities and long-term risks so rarely costed into the system of water supply.

As a consequence of this, the social, technological, and political innovation space required to demonstrate new civic infrastructures of interdependence and multiple agencies around critical commons is opened up. Furthermore, the learning shared from the River Dôn Project activates further innovation and research into the transitions ahead across the planet.

In conclusion, the River Dôn Project intends to demonstrate how our ontologies and our civic, political, and economic infrastructures can be shifted from a world view of separation to one of relational, multi-agent interdependence. How systems of governance, value, and public discourse could be reoriented and socialised to enable a holistic understanding of the social and ecological costs of externalities and the long-term risks created through the superseding of planetary boundaries. At a time when society and its very existence are threatened, we at the River Dôn Project are nurturing a new paradigm for tomorrow, a social contract for the 21st century – the natural contract.

Andrew Bownds

Uganda

Eco Brixs

Introduction to Eco Brixs

Eco Brixs is a recycling organisation that for the last 6 years has been working with grassroots communities actively increasing awareness of plastic dangers whilst analysing data collected to assess the impact of the informal waste sector. This has led Eco Brixs to partner with the Universities of Cambridge and of Makerereand the International University of East Africa and to win awards such as the National Environmental Management Authority’s award for Environmental Sustainability.

The 33 full-time staff members at Eco Brixs have master-level expertise in ESG Strategy, Environmental Law, Environmental Engineering, and Conservation Biology, led by a CEO with over a decade of experience working in development.

This expert team and and its research development partners have helped Eco Brixs work with the informal sector to support them in reaching recycling targets of 600 tonnes of plastic a year in Southern Uganda.

Research Context

The UNEP’s Global Plastic Treaty initiative in 2022 formally recognised the informal sector’s contribution to solid waste management. This has triggered the debate on how developing nations can formally acknowledge grassroot communities’ contributions to fighting climate change.

In Uganda, where 80% of youth are unemployed, flexible income opportunities like plastic waste collection have attracted an estimated 17% of Kampala’s citizens to engage in earning through waste. With Uganda recycling 60-80 tonnes of plastic a day across 13 core recycling processors nationally, the informal sector as the backbone of this waste recovery is demonstrating positive impact.

Goal

Our goal is to assess and implement clear pathways for the informal waste picker sector’s impact, to be formally assessed with data points across Uganda collected as evidence.

Methodology & Timeline

This will be achieved via the development of an interactive recycling map that highlights the geographical locations of informal waste picker sites across our sample size of Southern Uganda. A target of 500 sites will be mapped geographically. The informal waste pickers mapped will be interviewed to assess the volumes of plastic they collect and their working conditions. Data collected will be stored securely and confidentially.

This data will then be analysed to assess the carbon dioxide saved by preventing plastic from being burnt in homesteads, at landfills, or at illegal fly-tipping sites. The carbon cost will be assessed using third-party consultancy from Climate Stewards, who specialise in carbon crediting small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME), combining individual data with country-wide data from the Uganda National Bureau of Statistics (UNBS) and core privately-run recycling organisations.
By calculating the carbon cost of the informal sector we can accurately evaluate their national economic input.

The project will be completed over a 12-month period in which quarterly informal waste community meetings will be held at Eco Brixs to establish trust within of the informal sector and to collect qualitative data through interviews and quantitative data through review of financial and collection records. Field visits will be completed by Eco Brixs to ascertain geographical locations of waste collection sites, helping ascertain the scale of the informal waste sector’s impact in both urban and rural settings.

Outcome

Money talks, and using the evidence-based value addition of the informal waste sector calculated, we have a platform that allows for lobbying for improved working conditions and income security in the informal waste sector.

This will be in the form of establishing a nationally certified association, made up of elected informal waste picker leadership and all mapped members.
This association, backed by the research findings, changes the social contract affiliated with the informal waste sector, reducing stigma whilst celebrating both the environmental and community impact of the informal waste picker, raising status and awareness around the dangers of plastic waste, and increasing recycling activity across Uganda. The continued sustainability of the association will be guaranteed by Eco Brixs.

Conclusion

This research project not only gathers vital data for understanding the nature of conservation practices in the developing world, changing the social contract by shining a light on grassroots green economies’ impact, but also establishes a tangible support system that ensures the research is utilised sustainably.

Chiara Faggionato

Germany

The Maya Zug Project

Installation in the urban and digital space, 2022

The Maya Zug Project is a transdisciplinary and collaborative project that seeks to question the lens through which we see and analyse the world and our reality.

What is progress? Are mega-infrastructures really synonymous with progress? What roles does science play in our perception of the world? Is there another narrative, one that has been erased during the colonial project, that offers an alternative way of reading and perceiving reality and new possibilities for coexisting with non-human beings?

The dominant narrative has historically silenced a large and complex variety of stories, tales, and fables that tell a subversive and resistant narrative. Indigenous narratives are an example of the subversive power of stories. Indeed, they subvert and re-create what the Western academy puts forward as valid ways of knowing and present alternatives to it. In the face of colonial extermination, the articulation of Indigenous stories and tales are inherently resistant and threatening.

The exchange and research between myself and IQ BALAM – Juan José Chiriz Cuat – resulted in a symbolic image and story that represents an alternative interpretation of the mega-infrastructures built without any respect for indigenous communities and non-human beings living in those environments. This story tells how these large neoliberal projects can be reinterpreted from an indigenous perspective.

Through the QR CODE in the image, people can access and listen to audio with this story and access a web page with information and sources of inspiration and information on the topic.

The story narrated by IQ BALAM subverts the way the Western world is used to perceive non-human beings and raises new perspectives on how we should re-think and decolonise our relationship with these beings in response to the troubled Anthropocene era in which we find ourselves.

Visit the project website to listen to the audio and for more information: www.mayazugproject.com

In addition, any time I have the opportunity to present my project in an exhibition, I will open the space for the members of the activist collective Recherche AG, who research the impact of building mega infrastructures in natural areas inhabited by indigenous communities.

For example, during the exhibition THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG (Galerie M, Berlin, 2022), funded by the the Senate Department for Culture and Europe and by the Commission for Artistic and Scientific Projects (KKWV) of the UdKBerlin, a programme of open-air evenings was presented to accompany the installation. Outdoor film screenings and information evenings on the topic were curated by me and were realised in cooperation with the collective Recherche AG and with the neighbourhood association BENN, ‘Berlin Develops New Neighbourhoods’.

https://www.chiarafaggionato.com/der-maya-zug

The project is the result of a collaboration between myself (Chiara), European visual artist, the Mayan scholar and indigenous leader IQ BALAM – Juan José Chiriz Cuat, and the activist collective Recherche AG and is an attempt to respond to the urgent need to distance ourselves as Western cultural producers from the dominant and conventional Western academic research, rooted in colonial domination. It is necessary that we as Western cultural producers, aware of our implicated positions, accompany our practices by contributing with our means to the cultural and social struggles of the communities with which we are in relation. Our role as mediators and facilitators should go beyond individual artistic gestures, but should also be used to promote collaboration with social movements, activists, or NGOs. Our narratives must include and denounce the stories that still embody colonial violence and violence in general. For an approach based on the recognition of the implications of our positions, we ourselves must be the first voices to call out and denounce the perpetrator positions we occupy and have historically occupied. We must be allies first and denounce our own privileges and the consequences they have in the reality of other communities.

Der Maya Zug is realized in collaboration with IQ BALAM – Juan José Chiriz Cuat and the activist collective Recherche AG

Daniel Canchán Zúñiga

Peru

Barrios que Cuidan

Context and Justification

Historically, the system has assigned men and women different activities and spaces in the city: to men, productive paid work in the public sphere, and to women, unpaid care work in the domestic sphere. However, in the working-class neighbourhoods of Lima, Peru, due to the harsh living conditions, women decided to organise, to carry out care work collectively and transfer it to the public sphere.

From the 1940s onwards, as a result of heavy migration from the provinces to Lima, the ‘popular city’ emerged, self-built and without state support, through political struggles for territory and community initiatives to cope with the difficulties of living in precarious conditions. In these processes of city production, women played a fundamental role that has been made invisible.

At the end of the 1950s, women organised themselves spontaneously and formed Mothers’ Clubs, establishing a tradition of mutual support that in the late 1970s led to the emergence of the first Common Pots (Ollas Comunes). Subsequently, these Popular Kitchens were implemented, becoming public policy in the 1980s with sufficient infrastructure and supplies. However, these facilities were weakened by the lack of state support and the political violence of the 80s and 90s, a breaking point that would generate many difficulties for their sustainability, surviving the last two decades with minimal support.

In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic arrived and revealed structural problems that were already present: a fragile public health system, substandard housing, social gaps, job insecurity, family violence, and a lack of public spaces and care services in poor neighbourhoods. In Lima, it was not only a health and economic crisis, but it also triggered a major food crisis. This is where the importance of organised women and the importance of care spaces such as the Common Pots, which emerged in times of emergency with hardly any resources, became visible.

These organisations of mutual support, affection and shelter are led by young women who, on a voluntary basis, prepare and serve food at low cost, guaranteeing food security for families in their neighbourhoods. Despite their relevance, few efforts have been made to provide meaningful and comprehensive support to these organisations, which survive in precarious conditions.

In the current context, where the poorest individuals have been left to fend for themselves, the re-emergence of these collective forms of coping should not only be recognised as a tactic of resistance, but should be empowered and supported to become a way of cooperating in society, giving women the recognition they deserve and the tools they need to become catalytic agents of change in the formulation of a new social contract that puts care at the centre.

Project Background

Since the end of 2020, our association Espacio Común has been developing the project Barrios que Cuidan. This project aims to identify and implement improvements to the urban space of the ‘Señor de los Milagros’ neighbourhood.

After a participatory process, the transformation of the neighbourhood’s Common Pot was identified as a priority project. In order to carry out the project, a strategy of self-managed action-research was proposed:

The first line is the physical intervention of the space, through evolving the model of the Common Pot to a Productive Kitchen, where women, in addition to caring for the food of their neighbours, can learn and practice trades, and thus continue to break established gender roles, ensuring the sustainability of this space of care and becoming active leaders in the improvement of their neighbourhood.

The second, a line of research that investigates, through a socio-spatial register, the daily life of the Common Pot, showing the complete picture of these spaces and the people who inhabit them, from their own perspectives and the problems they face in it. The aim is to make visible the role of the women who lead it and the importance of having adequate infrastructures so that they can enhance further these tasks of care.

The project currently has an architectural design for the transformation of the space, which was developed through a participatory process and validated by the community. The execution of the work is planned, depending on the resources that can be obtained, in two stages: a first stage, where the first floor will be built, fitting out the kitchen and providing a large multi-purpose space for eating and holding assemblies or community activities, and a second stage, where the second floor will be consolidated with an environment for permanent workshops. From the research branch, some have begun to keep ethnographic records, coming up with reasoning for the dynamics of a Common Pot and defining guidelines for how to approach a study of these spaces of care. Additionally, these provided the necessary input to finish defining the design of the space.

Project Development

The proposal in this call for applications is to continue the process initiated and to materialise and expand the ideas previously explored, generating a pilot project that demonstrates that, by improving and strengthening these spaces, significant changes can be generated in the neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Lima and other cities in the country.

From a physical perspective, the most essential parts of the project will begin to be executed, such as providing the kitchen with an adequate water and drainage system and the coverage that will allow tables for lunches and meetings to be set up. Different allies in the construction sector will be identified so that they can contribute and expand the scope of the work. With this we could evaluate the changes in the dynamics of the functioning of the space and whether it manages to benefit more members of the community.

From a research point of view, and one that would take on greater importance at this time, the aim is to generate an exhibition and corresponding publication, which can be shared with the public and the authorities, in order to gain an in-depth understanding of the reality of the Common Pots and the best way to improve and consolidate them. To this end, it is proposed that leads left by the work in ‘Señor de los Milagros’ be followed and case studies be extended to other Ollas Comunes in the city.

First, we will review the practical knowledge acquired in the ‘making of food’, where the practice of cooking, as the most elementary of daily life, takes on a relevant role. Then, the links between women who come to know each other in order to cooperate for the same purpose, conflict management, leadership roles, personal life stories, and forms of negotiation with the authorities or with other members of the community, will be examined in depth. Finally, their relationship with the space that welcomes them, inside and outside, and from a gender perspective, will be analysed in order to see their role as producers of space and their legitimate right and conquest of the city through their care work.

This project, along the two lines proposed, seeks to explore one of the hypotheses that emerged in the case study of ‘Señor de los Milagros’: the women of the Common Pot, faced with the difficulties of creating a space for themselves in their own precarious and overcrowded homes, have created this ‘room of their own’ outside the domestic space. A space that they share with other women in the heart of the neighbourhood and that allows them to enter the public sphere, consolidating their economic independence and political visibility, not only because of their main objective, which is to prepare and serve food, but also because of the ties they create among themselves, which make them active participants in a new social contract, collectively confronting other forms of production exercised individually.

Debasmita Ghosh

India

Towards a New Society

Introduction:
The indigenous Kondhs are one of the last few Adivasi settlements that have sustained their communitarian ethos over time. The traditional structure of the village has always been a symbol and expression of solidarity. They live in harmony with other communities that have shared their living space in the hill forests of the Eastern Ghats like the Kondha-Doras, the Dalit community, and migrants from the plains of Odisha for centuries. Beyond their interpersonal community, family, and individual equilibrium, the life and livelihood of the community is inherently linked with the land, or the ‘dongar’ as local people call it – the forest that encircles the settlement – with regards to food, fuel, medicine, water, and shelter and is entwined with socio-cultural norms, religeo-spiritual lifestyle, and an eco-centric world view that results in a non-extractive relationship with the forest.

Their Kutumb, i.e., village commune, includes not only the people, but the forests, soil, water, and animals. Their series of practices involving knowledge, sacred sites, seeds, rituals, and customary law in the context of growing and collecting their foods, building their houses, health and healing practices, reflect the circulation of life.

The entire system is managed collectively. Power is not anchored in the individual but as a collective.

Their agriculture reflects the principles and practices of agro-ecology. They use agricultural biodiversity (cultivated and wild) to meet their food and livelihood security.

The Kondhs practice mixed or poly-cultural farming with numerous food crops growing in tandem. The benefit of mixed cropping is that even in extreme weather events, it provides them sustenance.

The village settlements, particularly the dwellings, were determined as per one’s need with a system of self-discovery, experimentation, and refining of skills that addressed the development of not just an individual but a community and was adaptable to incoming environmental changes.

Rationale:
A transition, though, within the community is fast making itself felt in ways that will only serve to tear down the very ecosystem which the Adivasi people call their home. These include an ingress of mainstream markets and a monetised economy, over-exploitation of forest produce for economic gains, changes in agricultural and food consumption patterns and sources, migration for work that is leading to an unbridgeable generation gap and its fallout in the form of individual mental health problems, the emergence of newer health problems, and a drop in collective community resilience with the breakdown of local forms of traditional self-governance.

The traditional self-reliant, biodiverse agriculture of the Kondhs has been encountering threats from various external circumstances. The dominant paradigm of mono-agriculture and cash crop production that is being increasingly marketed in the name of high productivity and high income tends to ignore the multiple benefits offered by the diversified agro-ecological systems being practiced by Kondh farmers.
The community sits on a vast area of plains, hills, and forests that has rich reserves of bauxite, along with coal as well as precious and semi-precious gems, making this a hotspot for corporate land grabbing, aided by the state to maximise revenue from mineral-extractive industries following a development model that equates mining with development.

The vision of unlimited economic gain and development spread as education in residential schools delegitimises the Adivasi language and way of perceiving the external world, reflecting an epidemiological transition and demanding a greater share of out-of-pocket expenses, with less importance being placed on the traditional way of life that people have been living for centuries.

The impacts of globalisation have forced many Kondh youths out of their communities, to abandon their agricultural land and traditional farming practises due to the large-scale acquisition of land by corporations in partnership with the state for mining resources. This forceful appropriation of land, water, and forest resources along with sudden economic and political changes influenced by corporatisation have resulted in a failure of collective freedom, justice, autonomy, and rights over their own land and resources resulting in large-scale migration of Kondh youths as unorganised labour, causing an overnight segregation of the casteless Kondh youths into marginalised poor, low-caste workers in urban society.

The seeds of the climate crisis are becoming increasingly evident in the Kondh Adivasi community of Odisha, India, such as prolonged spells of drought, too much untimely rain, and more frequent droughts, which are already being experienced by local farmers. The intrusion has impacted their culture governing agriculture, replacing sustenance with extraction, replacing shared spaces with atomisation, and contributing to more inequity in Kondh society.

They are resisting this attempt. They are critically aware that resistance is crucial but is not enough. The community, led by the youths, needs to evolve narratives of self-reliance and governancehat are primary to Kondhs’ way of life. The Kondh elders have been communicating with their youth and mobilising them to get involved in agriculture, forest conservation, harvesting foods, and on forest and village levels planning to improve their community resilience by further strengthening their self-sufficiency.

AIM:
Towards a New Society, offering an alternative to the present paradigm of growth: a critical participatory work of action research.

VISION:

The Kutumbas, or village communes, form the core of this system. The Kutumbs are general assemblies, with the participation of all the villagers. Each Kutumba sets up local issue committees tasked with discussing more specific topics to avoid bureaucracy and ease the operation of the general meetings. It is important to note that it is required each committee consist of at least of 50% women.
It is a step to become more self-sustainable and antagonistic to the dominant capitalist forms, thus providing us with one more contemporary practical example for another society.

I. Political: Gender Equity Focus on Next-Generation/Youth Participation
A conscious institutional, social, and political effort to equalise the relationship between men and women is required. One possible example for this could be the women’s councils formed by the Kutumbas. These are councils within which no decisions on general issues are made, but they are dedicated to the discussion of issues related to gender relations, violence against women, and in general all questions concerning the relationship between the sexes.

II. Economic : Village Socialism
A strong movement away from individual family income and assets, instead moving towards common income and assets, i.e., a community common fund, community food bank , community land or cluster forest, community equipment, etc.

III. Food: Local Self-sufficiency
A strong movement toward self-sufficiency at cluster level for basic food and nutrition. The mode of production grounded in principles and practices of agro-ecology using agricultural biodiversity (cultivated and wild foods) to ensure sustenance and livelihood security, bringing greater yield stability, and local adaptations to climate change. The core strategy focuses on re-localised production, distribution, consumption, and storage, and shorter food miles.

IV. Socio-Cultural and Technological
Vernacular architecture practiced by the appropriate integration of local science and technology and external expertise as a strategy towards the construction of habitations that would strengthen communal autonomy, ecological consciousness, internal solidarity, and resilience.

Devashish Sharma

India

Anubhutee: Experiments in Learning and Unlearning

Anubhutee: Experiments in Learning and Unlearning

Located on the outskirts of Pune, amidst nature on a one acre plot of land, lies the Anubhutee Learning Centre. The word ‘anubhutee, derived from Sanskrit, means to realise through experience. The centre was created with the intention of creating a space where children can come together and decide the direction of their learning. Each day brings with it a new adventure, the children determine the scope of their activities, and in general Anubhutee follows a democratic structure for decision-making.

Part of the weekly activities is a ‘court’ that is held every Thursday, and it is from this that my project, titled the Department of Poetic Justice, emerges. There is a box into which children can put notes describing who troubled them, and why they wish to file a formal complaint. Children are encouraged to do this only if they are not able to find a way to resolve the conflict. These notes are then read, and on Thursday, a jury and a host is decided from amongst the students. The children involved in the complaints are then offered a chance to put forward their respective narratives, and together they decide a consequence. I find this process of self-governance important, as it allows the children to reflect on their own actions and to observe the consequences.

It was while I was thinking about the Thursday Court that I began to wonder how this system might be altered – what other ways there might be to deal with conflict resolution.

The Department of Poetic Justice

Over the years, there have existed various social structures through which the idea of justice has been practiced, and I thought it would be relevant to explore along with the children how different cultures over time have dealt with conflict. I see the existing format of the Court as a wonderful exercise in self-governance for the children, but I do wonder if it’s the most suitable format for thinking about social justice.

The Department of Poetic Justice is a space to take forward the existing Court, providing a platform to discuss and practice various forms of governance, and ways to better understand the cause of personal and social transgressions and their consequences. The explorations will begin with understanding the current legal system, and then delve into the history of social structures and their methods for dealing with conflict. As we progress, it would be nice to have regular conversations and to also write our thoughts about experiences of having been wronged, or having wronged someone. These moments of self-reflection could be shared with the group whenever the person feels comfortable.

It is also possible that, as we progress, new formats for conflict resolution are attempted and their efficacy observed, and either they are improved upon, or removed and a new method tried. Another aspect of this project is to study the causes for conflict within various cultures, and in turn to learn from them. I see Anubhutee Learning Centre as a unique space, which offers an opportunity to understand ideas relating to justice and social structures/ contracts and their implications on a personal as well as social level.

I would like to invite parents and others who work with these themes to come and share with children their knowledge, and to initiate dialogues around these issues. Given the age group, modules can be organised such that they are relevant and easy to understand for the younger children as well.

It is possible that the current method of the court that takes place is best suited for Anubhutee, but I do believe this exercise of experimenting with a variety of formats will strengthen the understanding of what the notions of justice, legality, morality, and ethics point towards.

The Architecture of Knowledge: Libraries/ Study Centre

Architecture has been an important part of my praxis, and within the framework of this project, it provides a fundamental point of departure to answer the physical practicality of how people might come together. Built environments have also been an integral part of how societies have developed – influencing the way we move, live, and, in general, our relation to the land we inhabit.

Together with the children, and those at Anubhutee, I would like to build architectural spaces where knowledge in its many forms can be collected, categorised, and shared. With a focus on the materiality and the emotional response to spaces, I hope to think about the architecture of learning spaces, and the impact they have on children.

Possible Outcomes
Though the project exists within the relationships between people and all that surrounds us, there will also be tangible outcomes of the conversations, such as a collection of books, and access to information through audio and videos archives within the library/ study centre. Additionally, the conversations, writings, and drawings will also be documented and put together in the form of a book, and maybe even an online archive.

Of Poetics, Politics, and Justice.

Questions of morality, justice, and ethics that lie at the core of every human settlement form the foundation of my enquiry, and through my engagement with the Anubhutee Learning Centre, I hope to delve into the relevance of today’s schooling systems; their impact on the psyche; and the the ecology, economy, and ideologies that they promote.

The Indian schooling system, for all its merits, is often reduced to a machine that produces labour, and while labour is in itself not a negative aspect of any economy, it often becomes a means to control and manipulate populations, which serve to elevate and benefit only a few people. How can this be challenged? What level of agency does an individual have within such a society? How can we gather to share our ideas about such questions?

The Department of Poetic Justice is a project in close collaboration with the Anubhutee Learning Centre and is an attempt at expanding the idea of what a learning space can be. It aims to create a sustainable effort to come together to rethink the fundamental framework for learning in order to imagine, propose, and realise new social contracts or realities for the times that we live in, and for the times that are yet to come – it is a search for new ways of being.

Dr. Maureen K Luvanda

Kenya

Beyond GDP

Introduction

To move away from the traditional GDP growth paradigm, we need to explore alternative measures that better reflect the well-being of both people and the planet. Climate change, infectious diseases, and food security indicators can provide valuable insights into the broader health and sustainability of society. Firstly, climate change indicators such as carbon emissions, sea level rise, and temperature anomalies can inform policy makers and businesses about the environmental impact of economic activities. Incorporating these indicators into economic decision-making could encourage the adoption of cleaner and more sustainable technologies and practices. Secondly, infectious disease indicators such as mortality rates, vaccination coverage, and disease outbreaks can inform policymakers and health organisations about the effectiveness of public health programmes and the overall health of populations. Improving these indicators could lead to better health outcomes and increased economic productivity. Lastly, food security indicators such as access to nutritious food, food waste, and agricultural productivity can inform policymakers and stakeholders about the availability and affordability of food. Improving these indicators could lead to more equitable and sustainable food systems. Overall, incorporating these alternative indicators into economic decision-making could promote sustainable development and help shift the focus towards the well-being of people and the planet, rather than solely on GDP growth.

Research Objective

The objective of this proposal is to explore alternative measures for well-being that can help policymakers and businesses move away from the traditional GDP growth paradigm and promote sustainable development.

Methods

Data on carbon emissions, sea level rise, temperature anomalies, mortality rates, vaccination coverage, disease outbreaks, access to nutritious food, food waste, and agricultural productivity will be collected from reliable sources including the World Health Organisation, the Centre for Disease Control and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation databases. A comprehensive literature search will also be carried out to explore academic literature on the same issues. Analysis will then be carried out to identify patterns and trends and how these indicators can be incorporated into economic decision-making.

Justification

The project examines the Social Contract in light of contemporary crises by exploring alternative measures for well-being that better reflect the health and sustainability of society. By incorporating these measures into economic decision-making, the project aims to shift the focus away from the traditional GDP growth paradigm and promote a more holistic approach towards development. In doing so, the project facilitates a collective rethinking of key global factors such as climate change, infectious diseases, and food security, creating substantial impetus for a new model of society that serves the general interest. By investigating avenues for a new social order that prioritises the well-being of people and the planet, the project aims to promote sustainable development and address the pressing challenges facing society today. The project also aims to redefine the Social Contract by promoting a more equitable and sustainable approach towards development and ensure that it reflects the needs and aspirations of society as a whole. Through its research and recommendations, the project seeks to contribute to a new design for tomorrow that is grounded in principles of social justice, environmental sustainability, and economic prosperity.

Expected Challenges

There are several data collection gaps that may hinder the tracking of alternative indicators, especially in the Global South. Firstly, there may be a lack of reliable and consistent data on climate change indicators, such as greenhouse gas emissions, in many developing countries. This is partly due to the lack of capacity and resources for monitoring and reporting, as well as limited access to technologies and expertise. Secondly, there may be insufficient data on infectious diseases, especially in rural and remote areas. In many cases, disease surveillance systems are weak, and health data is often fragmented and not standardised. This can make it challenging to track disease outbreaks and monitor the effectiveness of public health interventions. Thirdly, there may be a lack of comprehensive and up-to-date data on food security indicators, especially in countries where food systems are highly fragmented and informal. This can make it difficult to assess the availability and affordability of food, as well as to track changes in dietary patterns and food waste. Moreover, in many cases, the collection of data in the Global South is often dependent on external factors, such as development agencies, which may prioritise certain indicators over others. This can lead to skewed data collection, focusing on specific areas or sectors, and leaving gaps in other critical areas. Overall, these data collection gaps pose significant challenges to tracking and monitoring alternative indicators in the Global South. Addressing these gaps will require investment in strengthening data collection systems and capacity-building at the national and local levels.

Expected Outcome

The expected outcome of this research is to provide policymakers and businesses with alternative measures for well-being that can help shift the focus towards sustainable development. By incorporating these indicators into economic decision-making, we can promote the adoption of cleaner and more sustainable technologies and practices, improve public health outcomes, and create more equitable and sustainable food systems.

Conclusion

In today’s world, where climate change, infectious diseases, and food insecurity pose significant challenges to global development, it is essential to reconsider our approach towards measuring progress. While GDP growth has traditionally been used as the main indicator of economic success, it fails to reflect the broader well-being of people and the planet. Thus, there is a need to explore alternative measures that can provide a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of development. This research proposal aims to contribute to this effort by highlighting the importance of alternative indicators in measuring progress. By incorporating these measures into economic decision-making, we can promote sustainable development and move towards a more holistic approach to development as well as encourage the adoption of cleaner and more sustainable technologies and practices. Overall, this research proposal underscores the need to shift the focus away from GDP growth and towards more holistic measures of well-being that reflect the health and sustainability of society, and by doing so, we can promote a more sustainable future for generations to come.

Eduardo Leitón Loria

Costa Rica

Peace for the Ocean

Peace for the Ocean Project aims to promote and declare peace for the ocean, recognising its vital importance for the planet’s balance and the survival of all life forms. The project will focus on social and national commitments to address the ocean’s challenges, including pollution, overexploitation of resources, climate change, and degradation of marine habitats. Through education, public awareness, and concrete actions, the project seeks to ensure a sustainable future for our oceans and generate a lasting impact on marine conservation.

Justification:
The oceans are essential in regulating climate, biodiversity, and oxygen production. However, they face pollution, overfishing, and climate change threats. The protection and sustainability of the oceans require coordinated global action, as no single country or entity can address these challenges alone. In addition to the environmental significance, the conservation of the oceans also generates economic and social benefits. International and national commitments support ocean protection, and this project aims to strengthen their implementation through a verbal commitment from society and countries. Preserving the oceans is crucial for human well-being and the sustainability of coastal communities, ensuring a healthy future for future generations.

Background:
The OneSea Foundation is already promoting the Ocean Peace Declaration in Costa Rica, which emerges as a collective response to urge different actors in society and the government to take actions that articulate efforts to protect the oceans and work collectively. In collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, efforts have been made to promote it in France in 2025 at the upcoming Ocean Summit. The goal is to promote this declaration so that more countries join and generate their consultative processes with society.

Objectives:
1. Raise awareness of the importance of the ocean: Conduct campaigns and public education to increase awareness about the importance of the ocean and the challenges it faces. This will include disseminating scientific information, organising community events, and collaborating with educational institutions.

2. Promote international cooperation: Foster collaboration and dialogue among governments, non-governmental organisations, local communities, and other relevant stakeholders globally. This will be achieved through meetings, conferences, and international forums dedicated to ocean protection.

3. Implement marine conservation measures: Develop and promote policies and regulations to protect and conserve marine ecosystems. This will include creating marine protected areas, sustainable fisheries management, pollution reduction, and restoration of degraded coastal and marine habitats.

4. Foster scientific research: Support scientific research on the ocean and its processes to improve our understanding of human and natural impacts on marine ecosystems. This will enable the development of effective conservation strategies and adaptation to climate change.

5. Engage civil society: Facilitate the participation of civil society in ocean protection and conservation. This will be achieved through volunteer programmes, community events, and citizen networks committed to ocean peace and sustainability.

Project Structure:

1. Promotion of the Declaration: A baseline text for the World Ocean Peace Declaration will be established, which Costa Rica will promote internationally and seek allies who support this initiative. Civil society and non-governmental organisations should also be mobilised to generate a global support movement.

2. Design of Specific Measures: Each country should design and implement legislative and policy measures to conserve and protect the oceans. These could include regulations on fishing, reducing marine pollution, and developing marine protected areas, among others.

3. Commitment of Countries: Each country that joins the World Ocean Peace Declaration would be showing its commitment to maintaining the health of the oceans by the general will of humanity.

4. Monitoring and Accountability: A platform will be maintained to track each country’s progress in implementing the committed measures.

5. Establish a Collaboration Network: Foster collaboration among governments, international organisations, NGOs, academic institutions, and the private sector to share knowledge, resources, and experiences in protecting and preserving marine ecosystems. This Collaboration Network should also be established. At the national level, countries can set their own goals and generate open processes for commitments that demonstrate the people’s will.

6. Sensitisation and Education: Carry out global awareness campaigns to promote the importance of oceans and their role in the planet’s health, as well as the importance of promoting the Ocean Peace Declaration at the national level.

7. Promotion of Policies and Legal Frameworks: Advocate for adopting and implementing policies and legal frameworks that promote the protection and conservation of marine ecosystems at the national and international levels.

Expected Impact:

1. Improved health of marine ecosystems and associated biodiversity.
2. Reduction of pollution and overexploitation of marine resources.
3. Increased public awareness of the importance of oceans and the need for their protection.
4. Strengthening countries’ capacity to manage and conserve marine resources.
5. Contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation of coastal communities.

Eleonora Mesquita Ceia

Brazil

The people is on (O povo tá on)

In the last decade, Brazil has faced a severe crisis of its representative democracy. The loss of income and jobs, as consequences of intense economic internationalisation, has produced a feeling of abandonment vis-a-vis the traditional political elites. Along with it, a far-right movement, Bolsonarism, has emerged as a new political force. In 2019, Jair Bolsonaro became president, adopting a nationalist, ultraconservative, religious and neoliberal way of doing politics. Bolsonarism has radicalised, and it became violent on 8 January 2023, when thousands of the ex-president’s supporters organised riots in Brasília and stormed the Federal Supreme Court, the National Congress and the Planalto Palace. The antidemocratic event was motivated by false claims over election fraud and the refusal to accept the result of the last presidential election.

Within this context we accept the challenge posed by the competition not only to think, but also to act towards a social contract for the 21st century. I am a university professor. I teach General Theory of State at the National Faculty of Law of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil. I coordinate the ‘Critical State Studies Group’ (Grupo de Estudos Críticos do Estado – CREST, in Portuguese), which is formed of 13 students UFRJ in the fields of Law and International Relations. The Group focuses its activities on the study and practical application of the essential notions and institutions linked to the State – sovereignty, people and power – from a critical perspective oriented to the political and social emancipation. We conduct readings, seminars and debates on the central works of classical and contemporary thinkers, such as Nicolao Machiavelli, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Chantal Mouffe, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In The Social Contract, Rousseau asserts that the people are never corrupted, but often deceived. In fact, dictators can manipulate the masses, but never distort the people. The social contract of the 21st century shall recover the category of people as sovereign and active political body composed of emancipated individuals through education. The focus should be on young people, who for years have been distant from politics in Brazil. It encourages a restoration of interest in politics among young people through collective engagement in favour of a free, participatory, inclusive society.

In short, our idea for the social contract of the 21st century is to reclaim the quality and disposition of the people to take action and actively participate in social changes and the political decision-making process.

We intend to put this idea into practice through the implementation of a project called ‘The people are on’ (‘O povo tá on’, in Portuguese). The expression to be ‘on’ is very popular among young people in Brazil, since it was said by a very famous Brazilian football player on social media. It means that someone is ‘ready to go’, in other words, ready to take part or to get involved in something. The project embraces two activities that are connected to each other and are based on the relationship between the university and school:

1) Under an umbrella agreement between UFRJ and the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court (STF) on the fight against disinformation, our group will develop an extension university project in partnership with public high schools located around the National Faculty of Law. Our Faculty is located in the city centre of Rio de Janeiro, where several public schools are located (for example, Júlia Kubitschek State School, Ridadávia Correa Municipal School, and Calouste Gulbenkian Municipal School). The member students of our Studies Group will elaborate and implement dynamic activities on deliberative and participatory democracy with selected classes of the school. Such activities would involve parliament and court simulations: legislative procedures of debate, negotiating, and voting laws, as well as judgments of constitutional complaints regarding the protection of fundamental rights and democratic institutions. Moreover, in order to enable the (university and school) students to experience a live legislative procedure and a court hearing, the project would include guided visits to National Congress and Federal Supreme Court in Brasília. After the antidemocratic riots on the 8th of January 2023, both institutions (National Congress and the Federal Supreme Court) are very open to visits, especially from schools from all regions of Brazil, in order to bring young people and state institutions closer.

2) The production of the second season of our podcast (PodCREST). The first season is a series of 8 episodes on the 35 years under the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988. The member students of our Studies Group have elaborated the content of the episodes and also narrated them.

Each episode describes in a dynamic and accessible language the most important events and topics from these last 35 years under the Constitution. The programme will be broadcast by Radio UFRJ from 10 August 2023. For the second season, our plan is to also elaborate a sequence of 8 episodes that would describe and debate the most relevant democratic manifestations of the people in Brazilian political history, for example, the 2013 June Protests and 1983-1984 ‘Diretas Já’ campaigns in favour of returning democratic and direct elections to Brazil. Select students from the schools’ partners would participate in the episodes as one of the presenters. The idea is to offer the school students a role as protagonists in order to propagate the activity as an example to be replicated and to encourage others to develop similar projects on the importance of stimulating interest in politics among young people.

Erika Salazar

Peru

Sustainable Container Homes

1. Introduction:

The Sustainable Container Homes project aims to provide affordable and eco-friendly housing solutions to low-income individuals and families who do not have access to adequate housing or have resorted to land invasion. By repurposing shipping containers and incorporating sustainable features such as photovoltaic cells and individual cultivation plots, the project aims to enhance living conditions and promote self-sufficiency within marginalised communities. The initiative will collaborate with municipalities to identify suitable lots, ensuring proper registration and access to basic services.

2. Objectives:

a. Provide safe and affordable housing options for low-income individuals and families.

b. Improve living conditions by integrating basic services such as water, electricity, drainage, and security.

c. Promote sustainability through the use of repurposed shipping containers and the installation of photovoltaic panels for clean energy generation.

d. Enhance food security and self-sufficiency by providing each family with a small plot of land for cultivation.

3. Key Components and Implementation Strategy:
3.1 Container Conversion:

a. Procurement: Collaborate with shipping companies to acquire suitable shipping containers from abroad.

b. Design and Construction: Engage architects and construction professionals to design and convert containers into liveable housing units.

c. Interior Amenities: Ensure the incorporation of essential amenities such as insulation, ventilation, lighting, and plumbing fixtures for comfortable living conditions.

3.2 Basic Infrastructure Development:

a. Lot Identification: Collaborate with municipalities to identify suitable lots owned by the state for housing allocation.

b. Infrastructure Planning: Develop comprehensive plans for the provision of basic services such as water, electricity, drainage, and security.

c. Collaboration with Utility Providers: Coordinate with local utility providers to extend services to the designated lots.

3.3 Photovoltaic Systems:

a. Installation: Incorporate photovoltaic cells on the roofs of the container homes to generate clean energy for electricity needs.

b. Battery Storage: Implement energy storage systems to ensure a continuous power supply during low sunlight periods.

c. Electrical Connectivity: Coordinate with local power grids to enable residents to access electricity as needed.

3.4 Cultivation Plots:

a. Land Allocation: Provide each family with a small plot of land suitable for cultivation, approximately the size of a small orchard.

b. Training and Support: Offer training programmes on sustainable farming practices and provide ongoing support to promote successful cultivation.

c. Community Gardens: Encourage the formation of community gardens to foster collaboration, sharing of knowledge, and a sense of community among residents.

4. Partnerships and Funding:

a. Municipal Collaboration: Establish partnerships with municipalities to secure suitable lots and access to basic services.

b. NGO and Private Sector Engagement: Collaborate with non-governmental organisations and private companies for financial and technical support.

c. Government Grants and Funding: Seek grants and funding opportunities from governmental agencies dedicated to housing and sustainable development projects.

5. Impact Evaluation:

a. Monitoring and Evaluation: Regularly assess the impact of the project on the lives of residents, including improvements in housing conditions, access to services, energy generation, and food security.

b. Community Feedback: Encourage community participation through feedback mechanisms to ensure continuous improvement and address any challenges faced by the residents.

c. Knowledge Sharing: Document and disseminate best practices and lessons learned to enable replication of the project in other regions.

6. Conclusion:

The Sustainable Container Homes project seeks to address the housing needs of low-income communities while promoting sustainability and self-sufficiency. By repurposing shipping containers and incorporating photovoltaic panels and cultivation plots, the project provides an opportunity for marginalised communities to improve their living conditions, reduce energy costs, and enhance food security. Through collaborative efforts with municipalities, NGOs, and the private sector, the project aims to create a sustainable model.

The project will collaborate with municipalities to secure properly registered lots owned by the state, addressing the lack of basic services such as water, electricity, drainage, and security. Through partnerships with governmental agencies, NGOs, and the private sector, the project aims to provide safe and environmentally friendly housing solutions while promoting sustainable practices and improving the quality of life for low-income communities.

These containers will be transformed into fully functional houses with basic amenities and equipped with photovoltaic panels for clean energy generation. Additionally, each family will receive a small plot of land to cultivate, fostering self-sufficiency and food security.

The project focuses on repurposing shipping containers obtained from abroad to create sustainable and affordable homes.

Francine Kliemann

Brazil

The School of the (Im)Possible

What if S.O.S, an organisation from the future, found a way to communicate with our time? What if they invited primary school kids to embark on an (im)possible mission: to help rewrite the future and save the planet?

Time-traveling bookshelves appear in classrooms, filled with mysterious still-to-be-written books from the future. Guided by these interactive bookshelves and a digital platform, the kids communicate with scientist-alchemists living in a collapsed future, who invite them to join an (im)possible mission: to re-write the future with sustainable solutions.

For 2 months, the students engage in different embodied and sensorial challenges, from the school surroundings, to a nature trail to visit the portal to the future (a green space in their local community). Their final challenge is to lead the School of the (Im)Possible: a day in which they are the teachers and the adults take the role of students, learning about the children’s vision is for a sustainable future.

The experience is divided into 12 weekly episodes, facilitated by teaching artists in collaboration with the classroom teacher and with the support from a digital platform. The project is interdisciplinary, exploring transversal skills and deep engagement with climate science, and anchored in the UN’s sustainable development goals. By becoming S.O.S. Agents, the students view themselves as agents of change, and engage in concrete missions and situations that transform the way they learn and relate to their communities.
Short video of the project: https://youtu.be/WeJcLeN586I

With a focus on transforming the current scenario and with a positive attitude as a reaction to the impact of climate change, the School of the (Im)Possible seeks to provide students from 8 to 10 years old with self-awareness as transforming agents, in a playful and immersive way.

On this video, the students explain some of the missions they undertake: https://youtu.be/iufvLcIKmvU

Here are some of the students’ ideas for a sustainable future: https://youtu.be/mHtKDVNv_I8

The project has a narrative structure which can be translated and adapted to each location and community, valuing local needs and the local environment, as well as training local teaching artists to facilitate the project in their communities. It is designed and shaped in co-creation with teachers, communities, and education authorities from where it takes place. In Brazil and Scotland, we worked closely with education authorities to align the initiative to their National Curriculums. This assures both sustainability and scalability to the project in the long term. A digital platform connects not only the students globally but also the local teams of facilitators, offering guidance for the implementation of the episodes, and it provides a space for ongoing research and exchange between the partner countries and teaching artists.

The use of ‘applied imagination’ coupled with the best technology, narratives, and aesthetic choices allowed us to completely immerse the teachers, the pupils, the parents, and local communities in a journey that not only demonstrated the joy but also has been adopted as an exemplar in how to teach about climate change through an arts-based approach. Although digital technology is one of the key tools of the project, perhaps the most innovative one is the immersive storytelling, which promotes a unique approach to learning about the environment with kids.

By embedding artists in the communities and schools, the whole experience takes on a live gaming culture that engages the school participants in raising eco awareness and protecting green spaces in their community whilst playing active embedded roles in their own journeys of discovery.

As Leading Scottish Education Consultant Barbara Grey Atherton, development officer for creativity for Education Scotland, comments: ‘The project combines two crucial elements of our time, the global environment and creativity in education, using an exciting partnership approach combined with a stimulating narrative which is highly engaging for the learners. The collaboration between the artists and teachers brings a new dynamic to the learning environment and enriches the interdisciplinary curriculum offer’.

Watch the video about the impact and implementation of the project in Scotland: https://vimeo.com/779595455

We believe that art, integrated with new technologies, is the key to transforming education, and a powerful tool in creating a more sustainable world.

The project was first commissioned by the International Teaching Artists Collaborative (ITAC) in 2021 and piloted in Brazil by Platô Cultural. Platô Cultural was founded in 2018 by Artistic Director Francine Kliemann with support from Goldsmiths University of London. Since 2020, Platô Cultural has been based in Florianópolis, Brazil, formed by a qualified team of artists, creatives, and educational experts.

Madeleine McGirk, Director of ITAC said The School of the (Im)possible has been a joy to collaborate on, and the tangible social impact which it has already generated is significant. ITAC is delighted to have supported the development of the first pilot version of this work, and now its expansion into Scotland and beyond.

With continuous support from ITAC, and funding from the British Council, we were able to extend it in Brazil and in Scotland in partnership with Simon Sharkey and The Necessary Space. We attracted local authorities, national educational bodies, and climate impact networks to help design and deliver a ground-breaking experience that could be rolled out. We have primed our national and global networks to grow with us. This includes the Catalyst 2030 network, Leaning Planet Alliance, The Climate Reality Network, The ITAC Collaborative Network, and the British Council International Collaboration Network.

Since its implementation, the project has made a great impact on the communities it has engaged. We have worked across the communities of North Lanarkshire in Scotland and Sao José in Brazil, having worked with over 1,000 students, their carers and parents, 70 teachers, 33 cohorts, and 13 schools

During the implementation of each round we run a impact evaluation following the Continuum Assessment of Impact. This results in assessment of both educational and social impact, measuring short-, medium-, and long-term change.

It has demonstrated the potential to influence and transform teaching practices in schools both in Brazil and in Scotland, which hold different sociocultural backgrounds and curriculum systems. As well as enhancing the school curriculum, the project also had a transformative impact on knowledge, attitudes, and discourse, where students: (1) increased their knowledge and awareness about climate change, (2) shifted negative perceptions about the environment, (3) took ownership of their learning process and understood their active role in making and transforming reality, (4) saw themselves as agents of change, becoming ‘guardians’ of their local portal and environment, and (5) became teachers, and adults the learners, in a shift from the usual positions.

Watch the impact evaluation video from de pilot: https://youtu.be/UVKDENC0Bjw

School of the (Im)Possible is a ground-breaking and innovative project, placing imagination and creativity at the heart of young people’s development, empowering them as agents of change, and providing new ways for them to learn, interact and relate to a world that is asking for reinvention.

A school for a new world can be made here and now, and it will be created by the kids, not by the adults. (Ailton Krenak)

José Rodrigues

Portugal

Green Steps

GREEN STEPS started 8 years ago, and it became our organisation’s main initiative. We decided to make something different that could be not only visually impactful but could also spread a message about climate change, sustainable development, and other environmental topics. The art installations take around half a year to be completed. The local and international volunteers and the entire community are involved in the process of upcycling and gaining environmental conscience.

In 2016, we had A Midsummer Night´s Dream, a steam-punk street installation composed of old washing machine parts. 133 drums were turned into lamps to illuminate the street. The project spread all over the world and reached thousands of people: https://bit.ly/3y5XbC4

In 2017 and in 2018, we collected more than 25,000 empty soda cans, around 400 glass bottles, and two dozen old bicycle wheels to transform them into artwork.

2017

2018

In 2019, we reused old shirts to make chandeliers.

2019

Because of Covid restrictions, we could not exhibit our art installations in 2020, but we continued doing what we could do anyway. That’s why in 2021 we covered almost all the main streets of the old town and made various installations we called The Message

 2022

As part of the GREEN STEPS project, we also do regular side activities – eco-marathons, street campaigns, movie discussions, and creative workshops – during the year to engage and educate people about the life cycle of products and their implications on the environment, human health, and the economy and to change their consumer behaviours and turn them into environmentalists.

Since 2015, over the course of this project, we have reached thousands of people and changed their minds and way of life. The project succeeds because it brings together many people from different social statuses and backgrounds. We work with local and international volunteers and invite the whole community to be part of the process, and they feel inspired by the results of the activities. GREEN STEPS activities are interactive and out-of-the-box. We educate people on environmental issues and sustainable development by showing examples and involving them in doing and experiencing for themselves, giving them possibilities to develop a set of skills that will increase their future opportunities. We have good practice in making environmental activities and raising awareness. Using nonformal methods of education – art and creative workshops, movie discussions, street campaigns, and eco marathons, which have the purpose of activating citizens to be more environmentally friendly. The project is increasing the level of knowledge in the community on topics of ecology, climate change, consumerism, and sustainable lifestyle and giving them opportunities to feel their actions can influence the lives of other people and contribute to diminishing the human impact on the environment.

GREEN STEPS is essentially a community project which strives to make people more responsible, wiser, and more sustainable consumers as well as active citizens.

– We mobilise people, especially youngsters, to work in teams, reinforcing the values of friendship, cooperation, responsibility, and mutual respect.

– We enhance the acquisition of environmental knowledge, as well as critical view and active participation in environmental protection actions.

– We foster an interventionist attitude and arouse the curiosity and interest of the entire community in good ecological practices and behaviour.

We cooperate with schools, local and international volunteers, municipalities, local bars, restaurants, hotels, and other non-governmental or governmental environmental entities. Reusing and upcycling garbage is not a new term, however, in the context, we live in, Madeira Island, initiatives of this kind are exceedingly rare and uncommon. Our works are out-of-the-box and make people think about environmental problems. With very few resources and a lack of opportunities for being an Outermost Region, we achieved the impossible. The results of the project are nowhere to be found. Our creations are unique and are made by local and international volunteers, without any artistic training. We continue to engage different people/actors from civil society while educating them on environmental topics. The project promotes inclusion and active participation as well as intercultural dialogue as we involve volunteers from other countries, using English as a way to communicate.

Our project is based in Madeira Island, but our works are recognised abroad. The international community has recognised us as an example, and we continue to be invited to be present in various seminars, webinars, or other events connected with the circular economy and green transition, among other green topics. Videos and photos of our art installations are spreading around the world by tourists, international volunteers, and locals, attracting thousands of viewers every year. We were invited to create an exhibition abroad, in Amsterdam for the Light Festival, 20018-2019 edition. The global impact of this initiative has enabled an interventionist attitude in the youth of our locality, fostering their ‘green footprint’. We already have some recognition because of this project: in 2019 we were recognised by the European Commission for winning the European Sustainability Award and in 2021 received a SALTO Award in the Environment & Climate Action nomination: https://tinyurl.com/2zw9cnaw

Every Year we reach around 7,000 people in the youth camp alone.

Kenny Lavacude Parra

Colombia

Redes, Escuelas para el Tiempo Libre

Redes, Escuelas para el Tiempo Libre is an informal education proposal that aims to close the inequality gap in education. It takes into account that poverty and inequality are problems of priority due to their direct relationship with the violation of various Human Rights, especially in younger populations. This programme, born in 2003, seeks to transform the free time of children and adolescents living in conditions of vulnerability, or who are at risk of social exclusion, into an opportunity to develop comprehensively and equip them with the capacity to face the social risks of their contexts. After 20 years of consolidation, ‘Redes’ has twelve centres distributed in six different neighbourhoods: Ciudad Bolívar, Usme, San Cristobal, and Usaquén in Bogota, and communes 3 and 4 in the municipality of Soacha, where they have served on average to 1,150 children and adolescents daily.

It is a social programme, focused on free time, by deploying five components: academic, artistic, athletic, nutritional, and psychosocial; and two transversal axes: environment and technology. This programme seeks to strengthen the so-called skills of the 21st century in the comprehensive development of children and young persons associated with ways of thinking (creativity and innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, learning to learn), tools for working (appropriation of digital technologies and information management), ways of working (communication and collaboration), and ways of living in the world (life and career, personal and social responsibility and commitment to community building).

The project has been implemented for twenty years in the Capital District and the municipality of Soacha, specifically in localities where there are significant social problems associated with poverty, vulnerability, and social marginality, which are: Ciudad Bolivar, Usme, San Cristobal, Cazuca, and La Despensa. Children and adolescents between 6 and 17 years old are the specific target population we are looking to approach.

The project aims to strengthen the skills of children and adolescents at risk of social exclusion in Bogotá and Soacha to build and consolidate their life projects, through activities focused on free time.

The specific objectives of this project are:

• To improve the logical thinking, problem-solving, and communication skills of children and adolescents.
• To develop psychosocial capacities in children, adolescents, and their families to face the risks present in their environments.
• To develop artistic and sports skills with children and adolescents.
• To improve the eating habits of children and adolescents in terms of quantity, quality, and variety of food.

By doing this, we expect to achieve the following results:

• Mitigate the risks of vulnerability and social exclusion as pillars of the foundation’s mission through the work carried out from different settings.
• Reduce the percentage of low performance or school failure, in the progressive search for correct cognitive elements and recognition in the student’s academic context.
• Encourage healthy lifestyle habits. Reduce the risk of malnutrition in children and adolescents, through the provision of a nutritional supplement that improves living conditions and their health in the medium and long term.
• Promote other teaching alternatives that facilitate the acquisition of soft skills, make visible artistic competencies, increase the capacity to recognise the talents and abilities of programme beneficiaries, and increase the interest in the development of artistic skills.
• Strengthen community ties in the territories; minimise the risk of making bad decisions; develop sports skills and provide tools that facilitate the reduction of the reproduction of gender stereotypes in sports.

We also expect 2,000 children and adolescents to be the direct beneficiaries of this project, and 6,000 parents and caretakers to be the indirect beneficiaries, who will receive psychosocial support to be able to accompany their children’s academic process and development. To monitor and evaluate the impact of the project, a Synthetic Index of results has been designed, which compiles and encompasses the results obtained in each component, recognising the importance of the development of transversal psychosocial and academic skills.

Mick O’Kelly

Ireland

Rhizomatic Time

The 21st-century Social Contract?

Despite technological advancements the ambition for Rousseau’s social contract that built connection between liberty and law, freedom and justice for the development and betterment of people continues to elude us in the 21st century. Following the enlightenment project where people understand reason and power to celebrate a better quality of life, the social contract proposed that people could only experience real freedom if they lived in a civil society that ensured rights for all its citizens. Rousseau challenged the Enlightenment aspirations that science and political and philosophical discourse would deliver a more free and equal society. His critique: Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification or to the corruption of morals?

Within the spirit of a Postmodern society, a contemporary understanding of the social contract will be measured by how well we treat our most fragile.

My proposal stems from my current research and art intervention between art and neuroscience, on the backed by an Atlantic Fellowship with the Global Brain Institute (GBHI) at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) 2021-22. The research emphasis is to promote and advance equity in brain health globally. Research shows that people with lower income and people from a lower socioeconomic background are greatly disadvantaged in accessing equity in healthcare. The research values brain health / brain capital in the way artists privilege cultural capital to imagine new ideas and forms for a creative society. As a conceptual artist I never really thought about the brain. It was this ubiquitous engine, the driver of our ideas and concepts. This research fellowship gave me time to focus on the brain as the content and form of the work. I am currently developing collaborations between art and neuroscience, but this immediately brings questions as to what kinds of knowledge each secretes. What marks their difference? What new ideas does it spawn? Neuroscience deals with the anatomy, functions, and organic disorders of the nervous system using sundry epistemic methods and technologies to frame a position on a person’s cognitive reserve and mental wellbeing. Art knowledge operates in a more fluid space of non-verbal and non-linguistic means of representing what we cannot see, hear, or say. This is not solely a theoretical collaboration but more an overall condition of living.

Rhizomatic Time

Some of our most vulnerable live outside of time and operate between several modalities simultaneously. I call this Rhizomatic Time. How do we contemplate and represent the complexity of time? There are universal conventions of standard time which most of us share to regulate for commerce, as well as legal and social purposes. There is the urgency of one’s body clock. There is institutional time. The hospital is a place that measures, regulates, and subjugates the integrity of one’s bodily autonomy. One can often feel the body is taken from us: it is fragmented, disassociated, discussed, and managed. People living with cognitive impairment, i.e., dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stroke, traumatic brain injury can live to a different rhythm whose time is not universal or standard but unique to how one’s life always proceeds at several rhythms and speeds. What tools do we use to represent these ideas and concepts? Conventional shared understanding of time is arborescent, a linear temporality and horizontal, in a single direction. The clock has twenty-four hours, synchronised with the sun and the moon in a wider cosmos of infinite expansion. We make appointments, we wait in the firmament for something to happen. We keep time, or does time keeps us? We invent all manner of rituals, diaries, schedules to regulate the body to manage and build a sense of cohesion for everyday living. In this sense, we have a sense of time that is shared. But some people live in a rhizomatic time, a kind of out-of-time. In the most extreme cases, they live outside language in a wordless, grammarless zone. Neurologists use the Montreal Cognitive Assessment clock-drawing test (MoCA clock-drawing) to measures the spatio-temporal cognition of person with cognitive impairment, perhaps Parkinson’s disease or some other dementias. This methodology frequently focuses on measuring loss, what is missing. I prefer to shift the narrative from disease, loss, and stigma to difference. We each have different capacities and abilities to generate new narratives. The rhizomatic clock has no beginning or end. It is a network of connections that are not always shared but create new multiplicities for actions out of time. This sense of time doesn’t operate in a space of lack or loss but a whirling polysemia of overflows. An abundance of other intensities. Is this where the creative imagination operates? How might we live among people who live with a different rhythm, whose time is not shared? Materially, the rhizomatic clock asks, do things have a fundamental essence, something as the thing in itself? It looks like a clock, but its nature has changed, it performs but doesn’t function, or not in any universal or shared sense? At the intersection between Rue Henri Fazy and Grand Rue 40 is a public clock on the Administration Cantonale. I propose to temporarily install a Rhizomatic clock (MoCA clock) in the existing clock at the corner of 2 Rue Henri Fazy, 1204 Genève. The duration is to be for one year. This location already has an institutional clock, surrounded by cafés. This is a place where people come to meet, most likely at an agreed time. It is a space of the public sphere, where citizens come together to discuss matters of interest and current affairs. I propose that my installation will gently disrupt notions of time as universally shared. And what kind of mind perceives time as Rhizomatic, whose life rhythm oscillates between several modalities? How to live among difference, in a society that is more inclusive? In advance of installation, I propose a period of research and collaboration with neurologists / neuroscientists and a small number of patients in Switzerland in order to arrive at a chosen Rhizomatic Clock.

Régis Lemberthe

Germany

Grasias — the Good Collapse

1. Blueprints of a Collaborative Collapse

‘Grasias — the Good Collapse’ is a design fiction exploring how, in anticipation of inevitable system failure, a nation collectively decides to abandon civilisation altogether. As they prepare for a big jump into the unknown, its citizens know they will have to adopt different value systems and invent a new social contract.

Design Fiction is a discipline aiming to foster debate around possible futures through a combination of scenarios and designed artefacts. These outputs seek to suspend disbelief about change by offering plausible and tangible visions of emerging technosocial phenomena. Practitioners of design fiction ask questions rather than answer them, usually through controversial proposals that are left up to the audience’s own interpretation.

For this project, we collaborated with agronomist, researcher, and collapsologist Raphaël Stevens, who observes a worrying lack in our alternative imaginaries of the ‘end’. Despite his efforts advocating for a model relying on mutual aid and local resilience, the idea still fails to imprint a positive image. The collapse of our thermo-industrial civilisation remains perceived as a fatality—a notion reinforced by the survivalist discourse and hyper-individualist clichés of preppers stashing cans and weapons in bunkers—and we remain unable to picture a decent existence without the market ruling over it. Should the pillars of western modernity fail, surely this would spell doom, gloom, and more doom.

The fictional nation of ‘Pyria’ at the core of this project claims otherwise. If one is to give breadth to arguments by today’s ‘collapsologists’ and by the Club of Rome before them, the question of an end no longer goes by ‘if’ but ‘when’. As authors and designers, we feel an urgency to envision the ‘good collapse’: a future where modern society can retire itself gracefully and prepare for a new type of social organisation rather than suffer through a sudden and incomparably violent rupture of its systems.

2. Transitional Introspections

Grasias isn’t so much about the next civilisation model as it is about the transition period that would lead to it. The fiction shows the last breath of a nation state attempting to support its citizens beyond the limits of its existence—to organise a future defined by uncertainty and provide the healthiest possible sandbox for a new social contract to emerge.

For a government to plan its own collapse, it must identify the needs to come and answer fundamental questions. How does a people collectively preserve what is truly essential in a world in decline? How can lost skills be retrieved, and new ones invented? What luxuries must be foregone, and what does one receive in return? What might be a minimum viable society that is satisfactory by today’s standards? As priorities shift, the viewer is brought to questioning the very principles of today’s society.

However, addressing these topics on a theoretical level alone remains insufficient. For change to happen, practical proposals must follow. This undoubtedly takes time, and the fiction shows Pyrians’ two-year mobilisation effort in preparation for the big jump.

3. The Pyrian Way

While the nation’s leaders equitably redistribute its land between all citizens, canned food production is ramped up in order to ensure subsistence during the first five years. Containers filled with essential items are scattered throughout the country, and all Pyrians receive a ‘Citizen Kit’ with essentials for a sustainable and enjoyable future: a map of the subdivided nation; a terminal enabling communications between neighbouring plots; bags containing all the ingredients to produce medicine or batteries, or to purify water; and a personal assistant that can help identify edible plants, build furniture from discarded sleds, or resolve conflicts. The kit also contains a parting gift—a bottle of state-sponsored champagne—for proud Pyrians to assert and celebrate their resolve.

Authorities must also handle the preservation of memory. SD cards containing randomised chunks of Pyrian culture are distributed among the population, making everyone a guardian of the nation’s heritage. Satellites containing a repository of human knowledge are sent into low-earth orbit. Museums are vacuum-sealed along with their collections. What gets restarted, how, and when is left as an open possible.

Following governmental incentives, corporations shoulder unprecedented investments. Airlines convert soon-to-be-useless planes into makeshift wind turbines, and, with a booming market for easily repairable appliances, factories shift their production away from miniaturisation and towards modular kits. Individuals at every level invest in the resources and skills they expect to be most useful in the next economy, organising the training of messenger pigeons as well as groups of athletes specialised in operating pedal-powered devices.

4. Towards a New Social Contract

The vision put forth by this project isn’t that of a new system but showcases a transitional period—one were a new system is hoped for, in the making, and engineered collectively. With the proverbial journey as a destination, we elected to feed the fundamental questions over answering them. The various diegetic initiatives that populate our fictional Pyria are as many lenses through which to explore the imagined world, the combination of which enriches it with complex, possibly conflictual situations for the viewer to arbitrate.

While some general assumptions can be drawn from the fiction, most are tangible translations of the research it is based upon. In a world characterised by a growing disconnect from global networks and a commitment to local resilience, a new social contract logically requires a cultural shift away from materialism and towards conviviality. In a collapsing world solidarity is key, and it is no accident that the collapsing nation’s new flag features a prairie dog—Pyrians vow to be frugal, alert, and look after one another.

Yet beyond the obvious, the specific proposal of Pyria raises more subtle and possibly controversial topics. That to bring about a new social system another must be sacrificed, and that a period of near-complete uncertainty might be required to perform the equation. That appropriate technologies might be the ones that closely match skills and resources rather than those exceeding them. That, when it is focused on answering fundamental needs, market economy has the potential to adapt to even the most radical of changes. That, unless pre-emptively challenged, privileges from one system will be carried into the next.

All these statements must be viewed as up for debate. With a world conceived as a conceptual sandbox, more fictional explorations can be conducted to resolve points of dissensus and, more importantly, raise new ones. As such, we view the nation of Pyria as a permanent work-in-progress and intend to keep poking at it through various thought experiments and participative role-play. New chunks of fiction may be added in the future, feeding the world-building with new elements that may equally prove or disprove the original assumptions.

5. Prototypes of the Future

The fiction of Pyria was imagined for the exhibition La Gran Imaginación at Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, which presented historical representations of the future. It ended with four contemporary futures, each commissioned as a collaboration between a different design studio and a researcher. We were assigned to work with Raphaël Stevens on a future of collaps.

A selection of fictional artefacts imagined for this project was prototyped and shown as part of the Pyrian pavilion in a future universal exhibition. This allowed us to showcase not only the practical solutions, but also to communicate the collective pride of a nation committed to their resolution.

Robert M. Geraci

United States

The Cybernetic Social Contract

ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) technologies provoke fear about the future. Will narrow, job-specific AIs replace human beings in the modern economy? Will they develop into general purpose, human equivalent (or greater-than-human equivalent) AIs that render humanity obsolete in the evolutionary future? Both narrowly focused AI and hypothetical general AI conjure deep insecurities because they threaten the fabric of society: they disrupt the relationships that maintain society. A cybernetic social contract is precisely what can aid us as we continue developing our technologies, ensuring the best use of current and near-term AI in ways that will simultaneously support human flourishing even in a hypothetical future with superhuman AI.

The use of AI to consolidate power and profit threatens humanity. It dissolves the social contract through the glorification of Silicon Valley and the initial public offering. Surveillance capitalism transmutes people into data points, consumers into the consumed. Technological products are designed not as services for a better life but as techniques for grinding economic value out of the users. We are directly and easily connected to one another via technology, but that connection is merely a mediation of our intents and values, marketed back to us in ways that discourage real human connection in favour of swiping up and down the smartphone screen. The unread end-user license agreement has become a tool for the sacrifice of natural freedoms under the illusion of self-determination. If AI technologies continue in their current trajectory, they will completely sever the relations that tie human beings to one another. There can be no positive outcome from human social relations collapsing in this fashion, an outcome that is unintended by the user and irrelevant to the profit-maximising entities that enable it.

Even worse, the deployment of AI leverages these holes in our social network to enable radical new forms of authoritarianism. The Cambridge Analytica scandal will be just the tip of the iceberg as corporations and governments race to surveil the population and leverage big data analysis to control behaviour. This will rarely be in the interests of the public. After all, the private will of officials is not always aligned with the will of the people, and both policymakers and their financial backers work studiously to make that misalignment opaque, profiting at the expense of the people. Economic and governmental surveillance inevitably combine to strip individuals of the free exercise of their will while hiding these new forms of control in ‘objective’ decision-making algorithms and freely downloaded smartphone apps.

There is no question, however, that the public remains committed to the kinds of political reflection (and rectification) that Rousseau suggests. In an essay I published in 2014, I showed that (primarily) young people use videogames as a mechanism for understanding Enlightenment-era political philosophy, seeing Rousseau’s social contract in the gameplay mechanisms and cultural attitudes of the Republic faction. It is not just that the Star Wars universe drew on Enlightenment political philosophy, but that the players recognised the philosophical debates and enjoyed participating in them. Such fledgling interventions in the technical space reveal the critical need for a wider, more robust conversation about our political future, one that takes seriously the risks and possibilities of advancing AI.

We need a cybernetic social contract that restores our relationships to one another and also opens the door for well-governed relationships with human-equivalent AI (in case such machines should ever arise). The cybernetic social contract would demand that the exchange of freedoms for securities be explicit and public rather than private and buried under legalese. This must happen in the economy and in governance. A cybernetic social contract would provide for the role of AI in mediating human relations in just and equitable fashion – AI that guarantees both the freedoms retained by individuals and the securities promised in exchange for those sacrificed. AI can and should be used to enhance citizens’ understanding of their political obligations and freedoms. By its inclusion in the social contract, AI would automatically be engaged in the negotiation over natural rights and legitimate governance, and thus could segue into its own rights and responsibilities as the technology advances. If AI reaches human equivalence, those rights and responsibilities will be vital to our self-understanding as humanity and to our production of a safe future.

Despite the loud assertions that we are near human-equivalence or that such machines are inevitable, they remain unlikely at best. Yet their conceptual presence in our world and their faint potential reality are both powerful, and both justify a response. Given that belief in such machines currently drives much of tech culture and the news around narrow AI projects like large language models (e.g., ChatGPT), it becomes a crucial avenue to rethinking how AI networks human beings. We must start to conceive of AI as an obligatory passage for the social contract because it has already been drawn into political governance and mutual obligations of responsibility. Many experts recognise the need to regulate AI in one fashion or another, but few have a defined sense of what could draw all the disparate economic, social, and political dangers into one field of solutions.

Social Contract for the 21st Century offers a compelling voice from which to engage these troubles. Artificial intelligence technologies help so-called social networks create social distance through perpetual isolation. Artificial intelligence technologies produce biased algorithmic decision-making in hiring, banking, and justice. Artificial intelligence technologies automate militarisation and permit new models of policing. None of these shifts in our economy, governance, or law enforcement have been vetted for social merit: they exist as techniques of power and profit. Building a cybernetic social contract would mean making explicit how our freedoms can be balanced with governmentality and a sustainable economy.

The cybernetic social contract project will support strategic engagement with the public. As an academic with strong connections to international, public conversations about AI, I am uniquely positioned to share the outcomes of my project with a wide audience. I am the author of four books, dozens of research articles, and a number of pop essays. My work on the cybernetic social contract will be the centrepiece for my outreach to both academic and non-academic audiences.

• Public and academic lectures – I speak to thousands of people each year in lectures delivered at academic and non-academic institutions using both on- and offline environments. I regularly give lectures in the US, Europe, and Asia.

• Popular essays – I have a history of participation in public scholarship, from my own blog to publications in sites like Religion Dispatches, to invitations to speak on podcasts.

• International organisations – I work with global, interreligious organisations like the G20 Interfaith Working Group for Reasearch and Innovation on on Science and Technology, and Infrastructure.

• Classroom education – I teach university classes that specifically address the future and the role of AI technologies. In particular, my FutureProofing Humanity course provides a perfect location to share the outcomes of my Social Contract 21 project.

• Published manuscript – my current book project is to transform my FutureProofing Humanity class into a popular (non-academic) book. This project will make a perfect conclusion to the book, arguing that Rousseau’s political philosophy, as reformulated in the cybernetic social contract, will be key to humanity’s long-term future.

Sahba Aminikia

United States

Flying Carpet Festival

Turkey currently hosts more refugees than any other country in the world. There are nearly 4 million registered refugees in Turkey, of whom approximately 3.7 million are Syrian, and 1.7 million of them are children. 48% of these children are under 18 years old, and 49% are girls (Directorate General of Migration Management, Turkey).

Refugee children in Turkey are facing a variety of serious risks in terms of their health and wellbeing, including communicable and non-communicable diseases, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, family violence, child labour, child marriage, school attendance drops, and lack of access to education, social services, and culture (‘Vulnerabilities of Syrian refugee children in Turkey and actions taken for prevention and management in terms of health and wellbeing,’https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7388819).

Our target beneficiaries are the Syrian and non-Syrian refugee and vulnerable local children aged 6-18 (living in rural areas of 8 locations of the four provinces Mardin, Kiziltepe, and Nusaybin). There are no recent studies that indicate the number of non-Syrian refugees living in these four locations, but as a local NGO working 11 years in the field, we have encountered many non-Syrian refugee children in everyday activities. There are many registered and non-registered Iraqis, Afghan, and Iranian refugees on these four provinces that this project targets as well. Syrians’ School-Age Population is 23,580 children in Mardin, 6,804 in Batman, 804 in Van, and 2,975 in Nevşehir. The number of Syrian children enrolled in formal education in Mardin is only 9,133, 2,422 in Batman, 304 in Van, and 1,482 in Nevşehir.

The Flying Carpet Festival is the first mobile multi-disciplinary arts festival for vulnerable and refugee children living in difficult places worldwide. The festival was created in 2018 by Sahba Aminikia, a San Francisco-based Iranian American music composer, in collaboration with Her Yerde Sanat Dernegi (Art Anywhere Association), originally a social circus school and a cultural organisation based in Mardin, Turkey, near the Turkish-Syrian border where 3.6 million refugees, half of whom are children are resettled. Other programmes held by Her Yerde Sanat Dernegi include: Sirkhane (circus and acrobatic workshops), Sirkhane Darkroom (analogue photography workshops), and Müzikhane (music workshops).

The Flying Carpet Children’s Festival (founded in 2018 by the sponsorship of US Embassy Public Affairs) incorporates music, circus, technology, art, and design to create a cohesive storytelling experience for underserved children and underserved minority communities near the Turkish-Syrian border. The festival occurs between September 15th – 25th every year at villages and small cities near the border where the access to education and cultural experiences are scarce. Flying Carpet is an innovative platform of creative expression for the most vulnerable children with large local and international impact.

Through this project, the festival annually brings 20-25 artists, musicians, dancers, acrobats, and storytellers to the Turkish-Syrian border as part of an artist residency and by open call. The festival forms collaborations between artists-in-residence, local artists, and child artists.

www.flyingcarpetfestival.org

Tatiana Chekhova

Turkey

The Facade

Turkey is going through a time of significant events. This year it witnessed the biggest earthquake in the last century and one of its most dramatic elections, which most probably ohas led to the end of democracy in the country. Changes are nothing new for this place: people living here witness the times running faster than the waters of the Bosphorus.

In the very centre of Istanbul next to Galata tower stands a building that preserves its habitants from the changes of the outside world. Every local knows its name: The Dogan Apartment. This building is a great metaphor for the modern Turkish reality, its segregated society, and all the stigmas that the upper-class people have. At the same time, it shows the beauty and richness of Turkish culture and a variety of crazy characters united under the same roof of the most well-known apartment building in Istanbul.

It so happened that the director of this project, a film moved into the building in December 2022. Surrounded by extraordinary neighbours, I decided to start capturing their life stories. Time passed, various events took place, and a simple collection of home scenes and portraits turned into social-political drama. That’s how project of The Facade turned into a full-length movie.

As this building is more like a secret society, it wouldn’t be possible to film these characters being someone from outside.

For decades, it was seen as one of the most notorious buildings in the area, swirling with rumours and gossip about its residents, but now has become an icon of Istanbul. Curious tourists try to sneak a peek inside its beautiful courtyard to snap a photo, but only the lucky ones are able to catch a glimpse of its beautiful garden full of palm trees, roses, and fruit. Often, curious onlookers are swiftly whisked away by a seemingly grumpy doorman. Life on the outside is nothing like life inside. The beautiful stained glass door serves as a portal to a parallel universe and a sanctuary, which many residents rarely have to leave.

Dogan’s 50 or so residents’ stories are full of eclectic life twists, and their characters are worthy of their own individual movies. Collectively, these people are special. They are pure romantics, and that’s why they choose to live here. If one wants to buy an apartment here, they won’t be given a loan by the bank, because this building is too dated. These people could afford living in a detached house somewhere on the Bosphorus shore with modern infrastructure, but they prefer squeaky old floors and heavy windows just so they are able to be inside these walls which hold 150 years of history. It is no surprise that many iconic films have been shot in the building. But the movie-like life of the locals is often far-removed from the realities of Istanbul just behind its doors.

Like living on an island, right here behind the doors, the Dogan is a sanctuary amid the chaos and bustle of Istanbul in one of its most desirable and unequal neighbourhoods. In this city of 20 million, everyone here is confronted with the constant stream of tourists, poverty and child labour, waves of migration crises, gender inequality, and creeping conservatism. For many Dogan Apartment residents, stepping outside is like stepping into outer space or out of the cocoon of a caterpillar. By revealing what is hidden behind these paradisial doors to its audience, this film provides an insight into the shrinking space of Turkey’s modern secular society and witnesses an uncertain period in its history.

The Plot:
6 characters with absolutely different lives and values have one thing in common: they live in the most recognisable building in the centre of Istanbul, and each of them has strong connection to it. The building is a uniting element, showing the crème de la crème of Turkish society. Standing on a hill with its massive facade, it stands out when you look at the area from afar. The garden in the courtyard makes them feel like they are in a safe and protected place, both by the shade of the trees and the security at the entrance. The building seems to be a safe place.

The characters represent different issues of modern Turkish society and refer to different events in the newest history of Turkey. Neurosurgeon Talat Kiris is politically active, and being a columnist for a local news website, he’s not afraid to say his oppositional thoughts out loud. Victoria Short seems to be a simple gardener, but later we learn her story: her husband was a consulate general in the British Embassy, and he died in a terror attack in 2003. She moved to Dogan right after this horrible event to seek refuge and keep busy with something. She was the one who started the Dogan garden as we see it today. Okan Bayulgen, one of the most popular TV presenters in Turkey, is tired of his television career and expresses his creativity in a new theatre play, where he tries to deliver his political stance between the lines. An elder couple, Kasif and Dilek, are rarely seen outside. They are hiding from the changes in the building and in an antique store which is located on the same street. Lori, an American cat lady married to a Turkish man, found her peace of heaven in Dogan.

Along with the main characters, we see the life outside: a dog walker who takes all the Dogan dogs for a walk, including Talat’s beloved Dagu, a delivery guy, a trash recycling person, and other episodic characters who represent the outside world from which many of the characters are trying to hide. These people connect the storyline and lead us from one character to another.

Events start to evolve fast. A devastating earthquake puts everyone in a depressive mood. Talat leaves to Hatay where he stays in a tent providing medical care to people in need. Dilek doesn’t come up to her studio for months. Some of the residents move out of the building having safety concerns. Dogan Apartmani is not their fortress anymore.

Closer to the election, the post-earthquake devastation calms down, people start living their normal lives, but they get more nervous as the election comes closer. This event will determine their future lives in or outside Turkey.

Full profile: https://readymag.com/u87667910/3695650

The project is fully organised by me and shot together with the DOP Ola Pankova and a local production company, Istanbul Filmmakers. I’m working on editing the raw cut now, it will be finalised in August, and in September and October the colour correction, music, and sound design will take place. I’m looking for the funds for post-production in September and October.

Viktoria Khokhlova

Germany

New Planetary Coalitions

The project was presented at the ‘For Planetary Governance’ online colloquium, organised by Strelka Institute and Berggruen Institute.

Project group: Eva Lindsay, Nico Alexandroff, Viktoria Khokhlova, Xena Poleshchuk

Link to the video on Vimeo

The Arctic is a place that demands new planetary coalitions, coalitions that extend outside of its immediate geography. Everyone has a stake in the Arctic. It is necessary for our stake to be mapped and thus governed. The project proposes a designed incompetence tolerance and a shift towards agile and reactive ecological governance, addressing what lies in our immediate future.

The site is the Arctic, and the geoprocess it affects is the infrastructure that exerts its influence on other sites. The exercise of interconnectedness reveals that the Arctic has the ability to radiate out with positive ecological and socio-economic effects. It is now closer than ever to all of Earth’s inhabitants. It grows through its felt interaction with territories spread far around the globe.

Our sensing layer is already well defined. It has the ability to collage an extraordinary range of sources abstracted into an image, albeit a frameless one. How do these sensed landscapes communicate with one another? Some sort of bilateral stacking is required to understand these exchanges. What does governance look like, not OF ecosystems but FOR ecosystems? What would the earth layer of the stack planetary skin look like as a bilateral, non-hierarchical, deep-time stack within a stack? Can we formulate the sensing of the seascapes through means of hardware, software, wetware, and then back to hardware? Every discipline has its own methods, engineering the way we document landscapes rather than interaction.

Planetary Sensing
The majority of ecosystems are fully embedded in technospheric flows. 77% of land and 87% of marine environments have been altered by human activity. However, all life on Earth will be affected by the planetary heating that ominously looms over our decisions today. The technosphere, then, is the space of knowing in the same way as the space of affect. The space for techniques where various scientific disciplines are understood as a common practice. It is a tool for contemplation that must be utilised in the reengineering of ecosystems.

This project reframes ecosystems of planetary metabolism as now part of the technosphere. Governance is required for geo-processes as if they were another kind of infrastructure, another technospheric flow. These are systems in which humans are inherently entangled, and thus our comprehension is necessary to inform further entanglement. In order to govern the trophic cascades of planetary flux, we must first measure and map them. Governance follows our ability to comprehend and intervene in dynamic processes.

Environmental changes in the landscape are not just an alarm for ecological engineering and enforcement: it is the basic character of the landscape as a dynamic system that reacts to natural changes. The question is what changes are bearable for the landscape? The history of landscape dynamics could help here. The past changes to the environment show a range of not only biogeocenosis variations, but also climatic conditions. The methods of geology and paleogeography allow us to look into deep time, studying every time period through its traces, where each layer of sand or clay becomes one durable moment of environmental conditions and, on a metaphorical level, represents time. This scientific method of sensing deep time changes uses bioindicators, geological patterns, and chemical reaction traces as a detectors of landscape processes.

The evolution of technological objects allows us to include the technosphere in ecological thinking. Our sensing layer is already well defined. It has the ability to collage an extraordinary range of sources abstracted into an image, albeit a frameless one. Our consumption demands become part of this image – the way we move energy, the way humans operate within ecosystems. Technospheric flows form part of the robust sensing layer in the form of shipping sensor mechanisms, air traffic weather mapping, and so on – the sensing layer is, in itself, an agent within the data that it is sensing.

Is there a possibility to make ecological restrictions more significant than economic benefits? To what extent can we change the biosystem in the context of the carbon capturing mechanism of the ocean? What is more important – an environmental bioindicator sensor or source of oxygen? How can we optimise the sensing layer in terms of carbon drawdown? How could we map the interconnection of technospheric flows to enforce or govern through models?

Ecological Coupling
Tipping points are thresholds where a tiny change could push a system into a completely new state. If triggered, the cumulative impact of these changes could cause fundamental parts of the Earth system to change dramatically and irreversibly. As it stands, the impact of regional decisions is felt far from the territories in which they have been made. In this sense, the Arctic is a system; it links territories through its changing dynamics and reaches locations beyond its immediate geography. The Earth’s bioregions are in a constant state of flux. Arctic ecosystems radically transform ecosystems that are far from the territory. Arctic ecosystem management can, therefore, drive the transformations of distant ecosystems. As it stands, the impact of regional decisions is felt far from the territories in which they have been made.

The potential for regime shifts and critical transitions in ecological and Earth systems, particularly in a changing climate, has received considerable attention. However, the possibility of interactions between such shifts is poorly understood.

New Coalitions
Collective human action is required to steer the Earth system away from a potential threshold and stabilise it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails supervision of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and societies. The Arctic is a place for concentrated sensing, engineering, and planning strategies. If things are altered, they radiate out. This alludes to the necessary financial, technological, and civic involvement of other places along vectors of planetary metabolism.

Nonlinear change can be transmitted across space and time in the Earth system. Current systems of governance underestimate the likelihood of cascading effects and are ill-prepared for their environmental management. There is a need for a reformation of how the Earth is social-ecologically connected, how these connections are managed, and how to best prepare for regime shifts. This accounts for both social and physical anthropoforming – a reformation of the anothropos that addresses both itself and the environment.

The Arctic is part of a planetary metabolism, with the ecological stakeholders not only located in the Arctic. Our proposal directs the enforcement on ourselves as a species. It is a self-evaluation mechanism which incorporates humans into ecological characteristics. If the climate crisis is a geopolitical problem, a suitable arena in which to deal with its reality is transnational, both institutional and infrastructural.

Winds of Change

Ukraine

The goal is to help build the capacity of schoolteachers to promote the virtues of diversity and create an inclusive community.

In the classroom, teachers can help raise awareness of diversity and inclusion using the ways they guide classroom discussions and content that is relevant to people with different identities. They can also help the class feel safe as a group, especially students who may be from minority groups, and exemplify the behaviour they model. Some benefits of this are as follows:

1. Provides a good foundation for self-confidence in early and adulthood.
When students are exposed to different aspects of the world from an early age in a safe way, they can learn with an open mind about people who are different from them as well as similar to them. Learning about people from different cultures, different religions, different types of families, and different ways of thinking helps them develop a deeper sense of security and self-confidence when they encounter these people in higher education and in the workplace.

2. Develop valuable social skills
Learning to treat people differently, especially people who are different from us, helps develop empathy. The ability to take into account the different circumstances and experiences faced by different groups of people helps students recognise and appreciate some of the things they take for granted. It can also help them form strong friendships both in and out of school.

3. Reduces prejudice and develops interpersonal skills
As students develop empathy, they can consciously reduce their prejudices, which allows them to form closer relationships with their peers. These interpersonal skills are not only valuable for building friendships but will also be valuable skills that will set them apart from others when they apply for jobs in the future.

4. Improve student achievement
As students begin to appreciate people who are similar and different in many ways, developing empathy and interpersonal skills, they become more proficient in the skills needed to succeed in school. They work better in groups, better cope with interpersonal conflicts if they arise in the schoolyard, and can cope with emotions more effectively.

5. Develops creativity
Getting to know different ways of thinking and being in the world helps broaden students’ horizons so they can appreciate the depth and breadth of the world. This allows them to better come up with new ideas, see different points of view, and be open-minded.

Teachers are the main role models for their students. Thus, they are in a unique position to ask soft questions when encountering situations where diversity and inclusion issues arise. They may arise as part of class discussions of the material being studied, as well as various peer groups and individuals in the class.

Activities
– Development of a training programme of 3 workouts for children of different ages.
– Development of methodological kits for teacher training
– Training will have a cascading format.
– 12 teachers trained (certified by the trainer course)
– Each trainer trains at least 70 teachers
– 70 teachers at the place of work conduct classes for 7,000 children and adolescents.
– In the conditions of war and post-war reconstruction, it is very important to introduce this training into school educational programmes. This will be the prevention of interethnic conflicts in the future.