Systems → Assemblages; Nodes → Knots: Social theorist Manuel Delanda adopted the term ‘assemblage’ to argue that social bodies on all scales are best analysed through their individual components. Assemblages are diverse, indeterminate and precarious. Our journeys through assemblages are drawn in numerous, ever-changing knots, rather than static... See more

“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

how do we resist the gravitational pull of the impasse and deflect these invisible forces of power? How do we imagine different worlds within the current political landscape?

Modernism’s methodologies of mapping, designing, planning, for controlling and changing deeply complex systems may not be the answer to the challenges we face. Maybe we need to go underground — working in networked, symbiotic companionships, like mycelial arrangements, to generate infinite micro-revolutions.

We are a collective body of many parts, both inside and out. By seeing the self not as an individual hero, but as one among many — human and non-human — a new kind of tentacular, multi-kind, multi-species politics of care might emerge, as Isabelle Stengers and Philippe Pignarre would argue.

Today the constructs that form our understanding of the world are being continually out-paced by the sheer force and speed of technological, political and social change.

“We have created things that we can hardly understand let alone control, let alone make sensible political decisions about. A new word to understand how mind-blowing it is — is hyperobjects. Hyperobjects are phenomena like radioactive materials and global warming. Hyperobjects stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast most human... See more

Often, hope works best alongside tools for proactively tackling future challenges. If our work becomes a catalysing force for people to imagine things they would not have been able to imagine otherwise and act upon that imagination, then that’s powerful, and for me, this is a slow form of critical activism.

What I have understood with the idea of staying with the trouble is the opening of possibility space. If you can move beyond quick fixes, we become open to the strange and the unknown, the ambiguous and the uncertain, the weird and the provisional.