Politics of Relationship. Douglas Rushkoff, brontë velez, Justine Epstein. From Kinship, Week 2.

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?

Session 4: Douglas Rushkoff: Being Human is a Team Sport

There is an anti-human agenda embedded in our markets and technologies, which has turned them from means of human connection into ones of isolation and repression. Our corporations and the culture they create glorify individualism at the expense of cooperation, threatening the sustainability not just of our economy but our species and the more-than-human world. In this session Douglas will reveal this agenda at work and invite us to consider how we can remake society. He will uncover how the intentional repression of humanity impacts diverse sectors of society, explaining how money went from being a means of transaction to a means of extraction and how education transformed from the ideal of learning into an extension of occupational training. Digital age technologies have only amplified these trends, making our systems more brittle and presenting the greatest challenges yet to our collective autonomy: robots taking our jobs, algorithms directing our attention, and social media influencing our votes. Luckily, there’s still time to think before we hit the switch and automate ourselves out of existence. Douglas will argue that we must reconnect with our essentially social nature, reestablish a place for humans in the wider ecosystem, and forge solidarity with the others who understand that being human is a team sport.

Session 5: brontë velez (they/them) & Justine Epstein (she/they): Ritual Reparations & “Commemorative Justice”

brontë & Justine will discuss their respective work and collaborations at the intersections of rite of passage, ceremony/ritual, ancestral recovery and “commemorative justice” (Free Egunfemi) in the midst of climate collapse. Engaging a re-historicisation of how we arrived to climate collapse, they will explore the “plantationocene” (Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing) versus the anthropocene and how reframing the epoch we are in changes how we are asked to respond. Wading through the spiritual and ancestral implications of climate collapse, they will ask: What are our respective inheritances across difference? What does our liberation have to do with one another’s and the more-than-human world? What has not been recovered? What has yet to be commemorated? What are the hauntings that live between us and in place? What do relational and ritual reparations look like between communities that are descendants of enslavement/indigenous genocide/displacement and descendants of enslavers and colonisers that accrued wealth through that harm? How does approaching climate collapse through ceremony help us get free together through radical kinship?