I was among the ‘first signatories’ of this petition initiated by Felix Ruckert, and I encourage everyone sharing the concerns expressed in the petition, in this context of Pandemic, to both sign it with your name and spread it as widely as you can (for example through social media).
Find the petition here (in both German and English languages): https://www.change.org/p/f%C3%BCr-die-erhaltung-und-f%C3%B6rderung-sexueller-kultur-und-sexpositiver-r%C3%A4ume-in-berlin
Posted in Opinions
On Tuesday March 9th 2021 at 18:30 CET (5:30 PM UTC), Sacha Kagan will give an online talk at the “Cambridge City Seminar”, via Zoom. To listen in, you need to register in advance on Eventbrite here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cambridge-city-seminar-cities-of-emergent-wisdom-registration-143703167041?aff=erelexpmlt
Cities of Emergent Wisdom: Urban Spaces of Possibility for Sustainable Urban Development
Dominant conceptions of sustainable urban development are rooted in a universalist definition of sustainability, whose thin goals are pursued through cybernetic apparatuses of control (lately in the guise of so-called smart cities). However, alternatives to this nefarious social imaginary of planned sustainability do also flourish around the world, which will be the focus of this talk. A procedural definition of sustainability, whereby desirable futures emerge as they are imagined and negotiated through collaboration, restores the generative spaces of culture, social creativity and politics of cooperation.
In his talk, Kagan will share empirical research into the qualities of urban spaces of possibility for sustainable urban development: local and translocal spaces of challenging experience, imagination, experimentation and ‘Gestaltung’ (making/designing/crafting).
In these spaces, the processes of imagination, creativity and experimentation are related to politics of cooperation that navigate between dialectic and dialogic forms (as discussed in Richard Sennett’s book Together).
The talk will also consider how some of these urban spaces of possibility are supported by specific forms of digital collaborative spaces and what kinds of virtual networks are involved. This will further lead to the legal-economic question of property regimes in relation to emergent spaces of possibility.
The talk will evoke the connection between the local level (or rather “nearby scale”, to take up the expression by Biao Xiang in his talk at this season’s Cambridge City Seminar) of urban spaces of possibility, and the wider whole-city scale of institutional innovation, through transversal and trans-sectoral agencies.
Time allowing, the talk may also include Kagan’s newest reflection on a difference between “spaces of possibility” and more elusive, suppressed and queering “spaces of potentiality”.
Urban spaces of possibility (and spaces of potentiality) may then contribute to cities of emergent wisdom, a counter-model to the “brave new world” of the smart city. More generally, this approach points to creative cultures of sustainability, informed by aesthetics of qualitative complexity (i.e. a deepening of ecologization of thinking beyond merely cybernetic complexity).
Posted in University
I will be contributing a talk (viewable live on youtube) at a roundtable on January 20th 2021 (at 18:00 CET, 19:00 in Romania, 11:00 in Mexico) that is convened by Cristian Ungureanu, Vice-Rector of the George Enescu National University of Arts in Iasi (Romania) in collaboration with the CIRET in Paris (France). This event is part of the online format of the 3rd World Congress of Transdisciplinarity, organized from Mexico.
Youtube Links:
Posted in News
In February 2020, Dr. Sacha Kagan produced a series of three video lectures for the “Performing Sustainability: Cultures and Development in West-Africa” Graduate School, by the University of Hildesheim (Germany), the University of Maiduguri (Nigeria) and the University of Cape Coast (Ghana). February 2020.
I am now releasing publically on Youtube the second video: “Introduction to Walking with Video”
The third video will be released in a few weeks. Come back here to find it soon… 🙂
To find out more about the Graduate School, visit https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/sustainability/https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/sustainability/
Posted in University
I have the pleasure to share the news that the Triple Special Issue that I guest-edited in the journal “World Futures” (Volume 76, Issue 5-7), with the title “Queer Convivialist Perspectives for Sustainable Futures”, is now available online on the journal’s website at https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gwof20/76/5-7?nav=tocList . The print version will be released soon by the journal.
The journal has a limited number of free downloads of my general introduction to the special issue, if you click on this link: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/CBXEMQCBIGTCYXBEUMYR/full?target=10.1080/02604027.2020.1777834
The special issue of World Futures on “queer convivialist perspectives for sustainable futures” focuses its attention on the potential insights that queer approaches may bring to sustainability research and to the search for sustainable futures. It suggests a queering of conviviality, reaching beyond the anthroponormative limitation of the Convivialist Manifesto and its lack of attention to bodies, while taking up its focus on humans as desiring beings and its implicit invitation to queer good lives. The contributed articles share transdisciplinary (academic and arts-based) research that offers analyses and interpretations opening up new perspectives for transformation of individuals and society.
Please note: The articles in this Special Issue of the journal World Futures were written by their respective authors in the course of year 2019. Hence, the special issue refers mainly to the 1st “Convivalist Manifesto”, published in 2013. Meanwhile, a second Convivialist Manifesto was released in French in early 2020, is available in German since mid-2020, and should be soon also released in full in English by late 2020 or early 2021. My introduction to the special issue refers shortly to that latest development.
Posted in publications
