facultyexplore advaya’s teachers
Explore advaya's faculty of teachers, scientists, practitioners, philosophers and storytellers, who share multidimensional, local and diverse narratives from across the world.
Bayo Akomolafe
Sophie Strand
Satish Kumar
Vandana Shiva
Veronica Strang
Manda Scott
Beloved Sara Zaltash
David Abram
Dr Andreas Weber
David Whyte
Helena Norberg-Hodge
Dr. Predrag Slijepcevic
Charles Eisenstein
Aisha Paris Smith
Brontë Velez
Hannah Close
Hannah is a writer, photographer, curator and researcher exploring philosophy, ecology, culture and being alive in a world of relations.
Hannah is a writer, photographer, curator and researcher exploring philosophy, ecology, culture and being alive in a world of relations. She is currently making a documentary called Islandness in the Anthropocene and convenes floating artist residencies in the Hebrides with Sail Britain. She writes METAXU on Substack.
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Kinship: Being Together
A transformative online course exploring community, relationality & belonging in the worlds we live in. What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be in relationship with the ever-unfurling world we find ourselves a part of? What, exactly, is community? And who do we really mean when we say _we_? The Kinship 2022 course is an exploration into being together in a time when being apart has fractured our relationship to self, other, and the more-than-human in ways that have left us painfully adrift. It is a timely collective inquiry into how community, relationality, and belonging can revitalise our sense of aliveness as creatures of and participants in this animate earth, and how such a renewal might influence our actions towards greater flourishing. _One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone._ Shannon L. Alder
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Kinship: Islands
As our relational interdependencies are thrown into ever-greater relief as a result of the global ‘metacrisis’, the metaphor ‘world as archipelago’ offers us an intriguing way to look at our interconnected amphibious existence. Expanding on (and challenging) the notion of the ‘global village’, an archipelagic outlook acknowledges both our connections and separations as foundational to our relationships, all the while inviting our oft-forgotten ocean kin into our awareness.
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Ecology of Love
When we rediscover ecology as a vibrant love story, we can unlearn the violent habits of our civilisation, join this course and explore the ecology of love with biophilosopher, writer, and marine biologist Dr Andreas Weber.
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Contemporary Spirituality
Explore the foundations of meaning and belief in the modern world, connections between the sacred and profane, and topics including altered states, eco-spirituality, and sacred activism. You will learn how to navigate through these confused times with a greater understanding of spirituality and its place within our intersecting ecosystems of meaning.
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An Ecology of Love
‘The Earth is currently suffering from a shortage of our love’, writes biophilsopher and marine biologist, Andreas Weber, in Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology.
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World as Archipelago
advaya’s lead curator, Hannah Close, the curator of our multi-teacher, six-week course, KINSHIP: World as Archipelago, introduces the metaphor “World as Archipelago”, and talks about the implications this framework has on our relationships in the context of this shared elemental home.
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What can islands teach us?
In this winding, non-linear, continent-crossing conversation with advaya, Hannah Close discusses archipelagic thinking, what islands can teach us about belonging, identity, community, borders, thresholds and more, connection-in-separation, osmosis and globalisation, and other thoughts that went into the curation of the upcoming online course, KINSHIP: World as Archipelago.
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Who gets to define reality?
In this free webinar, author of Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach For Everyone, Minna Salami, joins advaya to introduce this paradigm-shifting framework. Minna asserts boldly that the dominant knowledge paradigm—obssesed with quantification, rationalisation, reason and deduction—has led to the crises of separation, and is thus detrimental to our individual, collective, and environmental wellbeing. It is more important than ever to now explore new ways of being in the world. In this webinar, Minna will introduce sensuous knowledge, a model of knowledge rooted in the dynamic landscape of black feminist thought. It is one that empowers, enlivens, and liberates, through embodied insight. The key here is embodied insight: how does rooting ourselves in the present, in our bodies and in this world, liberate us? Minna, the host and curator of the upcoming online course with advaya of the same name, Sensuous Knowledge, will take us through the course topics and themes, and through this conversation explore why a collective inquiry into knowledge is so relevant now, and for each of us.
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Our meaning crisis and the new gods of modernity
Ahead of advaya’s upcoming multi-teacher online course Contemporary Spirituality, we speak with host and curator Hannah Close about how the ways in which we seek meaning have changed, what has taken the place of grand narratives and the institution of religion, moving towards healthier sources of meaning and foundations of the ‘sacred’, the ethics of spirituality practices and cultural and religious exchanges, and more. How can we find our place within intersecting ecosystems of meaning in the modern age?
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Towards The Great Mystery
While it may not be plausible or wise to ‘de-secularise’ society, there is a clear need for an earthbound sense of the sacred and a more inclusive, mycelial infrastructure for congregation. In times as fragile and fractured as these, faith in The Great Mystery may well be one of the only sound ways forward. Thich Nhat Hanh said, ‘the next Buddha may be a Sangha (community)’. Perhaps, and I hope, the new God will take note.
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Dark Green Gods: on hyperobjects, animism and the greening of religion
In Dark Green Religion, environmentalism intersects with religiosity to sanctify nature. It proposes a sacred view of the natural world, so could this be an answer to our ecological crises? In this webinar, Hannah Close, curator of Contemporary Spirituality, dialogues with Timothy Morton, one of the course teachers, about eco-spirituality, religion in the modern Western world, 'Nature' as a concept, hyperobjects (a term coined by Tim), and more.
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Sensuous Knowledge as a radical and holistic journey towards liberation
In this free webinar, author of Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach For Everyone, Minna Salami, joins advaya to introduce this paradigm-shifting framework.
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Love as the desire to give life
In this conversation hosted by Hannah Close from advaya, Andreas Weber elaborates on his theories and thoughts around erotic ecology, an ecology of love, what we've gotten wrong about "love", stringing together his fresh analyses on love, life, death, identity, and everything in between, on an autumnal day. For more on these topics, read Andreas' book, Matter and Desire, and join us for his upcoming course, co-curated by Hannah Close, Ecology of Love.
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Our meaning crisis and the new gods of modernity
Ahead of advaya’s upcoming multi-teacher online course Contemporary Spirituality, we speak with host and curator Hannah Close about how the ways in which we seek meaning have changed, what has taken the place of grand narratives and the institution of religion, moving towards healthier sources of meaning and foundations of the ‘sacred’, the ethics of spirituality practices and cultural and religious exchanges, and more. How can we find our place within intersecting ecosystems of meaning in the modern age?
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Dark Green Gods: on hyperobjects, animism and the greening of religion
In Dark Green Religion, environmentalism intersects with religiosity to sanctify nature. It proposes a sacred view of the natural world, so could this be an answer to our ecological crises? In this webinar, Hannah Close, curator of Contemporary Spirituality, dialogues with Timothy Morton, one of the course teachers, about eco-spirituality, religion in the modern Western world, 'Nature' as a concept, hyperobjects (a term coined by Tim), and more.
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Being & Becoming Kin
The end is near and we are asking, what next? How can we practise kinship in our own lives? How might we be able to help our communities, and those we don't belong to? We will look at how we can reconceive kinship in the context of modernity. After all these discussions and explorations, how have our notions of kinship blossomed? What can we embody going forward?
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Thinking and kinning with islands
"There have been loads of different metaphors used to try and describe the inherent unity of human civilisation across the planet. And they've all been quite well-meaning, but they haven't quite covered various different bases that I think are really important to cover, when it comes to looking at the ways in which we are interconnected. So the "world is archipelago" metaphor, for me at least, is a way of seeing our interconnected nature in a different, more complex and more nuanced way, than other metaphors might allow us to see."
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Why kinship?
Excerpts from Part 1 of the online inquiry: Kinship: An Exploration into Being Together with Gavin Van Horn, Jeremy Lent and Charlotte Du Cann. In this session we began by framing our collective crises through the lens of relationship. We wanted to ask: how have our ways of relating created destruction? Where have we been separated from reality, each other, and our more-than-human kin? Why does the "crisis of relationship" matter? We focus on the loss of belonging which resides at the core of many of the crises we face. We want to understand why belonging is integral to life, the ways we relate, and how we flourish as human (and more-than human) beings. We will explore how kinship as a form of relationship and belonging is crucial during these times of unravelling.
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The individual
Kinship Highlights Week 4: The Individual This week we explore the role of the individual in relation to kinship. This week is unique in that there is a sense of "going against the grain". Many narratives around community and kinship have suggested that the notion of the individual is to blame for the collapse of healthy relationships. It is true that the narcissistic individualism peddled by capitalism has wreaked havoc. However it is the "ism" that has caused harm, not the individual. In fact, attempts to erase the sacredness of the individual create immense harm. When people feel that they are not seen and that their needs don't matter, harm tends to follow. We explore how cultivating a healthy sense of our individuality allows us to become responsible in relationship. Can we have kinship with ourselves? Nuance is key here - because we are both individuals and we are not. It's a "both/and" situation.
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Relational ecosystems
This week, we look at the grounds in which relationships form. Where exactly does kinship arise? What is the importance of place in all of this? Why is context critical? We look at how the quality of the environment and the architecture of the spaces we inhabit informs the quality of our relationships. We explore how unusual "places”, like the internet, or a science lab, can also lead to forms of kinship, and why this is important in a time when many feel they need to retreat to pristine nature in order to feel connection (this option is widely unavailable). This week is about where we find ourselves.
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The community
This week we will explore how community creates belonging and kinship, and how it can also fracture it (building on lessons learned from the previous week). What, exactly, comprises a community? How does kinship come into this? Can there be community without kinship? What might community mean in the contexts we find ourselves in? How does community go beyond sentimental images of sitting around a campfire? Can we be in community with those who are "not like us"? We will also explore being in community with the more-than-human later in the course. We want to understand how community tugs at the thresholds between the individual and the collective - how does this tension affect the quality of our relationships?
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Politics of relationship
A video of highlights from Week 2 of the online inquiry Kinship: An Exploration Into Being Together, with Douglas Rushkoff, brontë velez and Justine Epstein. In the session we look at how relationship is inherently political. We explore how certain relationships are conditional, and how relationships can both serve and extract. How are our relationships being influenced or controlled? We want to ask the question: "who do we (really) mean when we say "we"? As collective action is called for - who is called to take action? Who is included/excluded? Does kinship bring with it a sense of responsibility for the "other"? Does the "other" necessarily imply "othering", or can we view the "other" as crucial to relationship itself?