Hospicing Modernity Together
A guided group reading of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti)'s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
A guided group reading of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti)'s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
Humans are offered – forced into, really – relatively few roles and identities in modernity. On this first call, we’ll unpack how we’ve been made to live as conquerers, occupiers, Homo colossus, separated from and domineering over the living world. Our population, our consumption, and the myths we've been offered all inform this role we can choose to resist.
A guided group reading of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti)'s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
What is our place in the world? What should it be? What do we have to offer Earth and her living and non-living (so far as we think we know) communities? We regulary see appeals to the privilge or necessity of humans as stewards of the Earth. But what do these claims imply — ownership, power over, posession? Are we above the Earth, separate from her, as her managers? Where does our stewardship lead — or, how do we choose to make decisions as stewards? Do we choose what’s best for all beings, or do we consciously or unconsciously shape the world for our specific benefit? The idea of being a steward does get at an important point of course: we can and should have a role in co-creating an abundant, diverse living world. Could we do that as stewards? Or perhaps it’s better to imagine ourselves as siblings or neighbors, a more horizontal relationship with all other non-human members of the living world.
Good Grief is a group exploration of our collective grief through the frameworks of Francis Weller's Five Gates of Grief (The Wild Edge of Sorrow). Inspired by our EcoGathering on Grieving during the autumnal Composting series in 2024 and an increasing urgency to process the compounding loss we experience as the continuation of modernity relies on genocide, ecocide, omnicide and fascism's impingement on our basic rights and liberties, we will hold space to tend to the complex and often unaddressed grief that accompanies these losses and expand our emotional capacity for collective grieving as a skill for navigating uncertain futures.
A guided group reading of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti)'s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism
Drop in and talk with Nissa or Erik about anything on your mind. If you are new to EcoGather this is a great place to come get up to speed with everything that has been going on in the community. We'll be here for the whole hour, so drop in whenever you can.
What does it mean to exist as a “citizen”? A citizen of where, exactly? We are only told to identify as a citizen of a nation-state (in the context of empire), and we are reduced into so many other flattening categories conducive to the growth of oppressive systems (“consumers”, “voters”, and other labels that amputate our role in the world and leave us only as captured participants in abusive systems). Can we simultaneously exist as citizens of empire, of our smaller communities, and the living world?
In this study group club we discuss all the myriad ways we might gain great control of our communications, whether for crisis response, grid-down scenarios, increased security, improved attention, and anything in between. In this session one of our participants will be presenting on the development of a DIY dumb-phone.
This is a mixed-experience group of people with different skills to research and assess varied models for collective and cooperative land-based living, sustenance, and enterprise. Study group members will identify together several possible paths to investigate more fully, divide up the work of familiarizing themselves with helpful models, literature, and case-studies.