What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?

The Emergence Network is a research inquiry into the otherwise.

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We are a constellation of humans and nonhumans working together trans-locally to curate projects, rituals, conversations and events that nurture senses of the otherwise via practices that trouble the traditional boundaries of agency and possibility.

We seek to shock outmoded modes of perception and action. We want to show how human bodies are changing, how whales and discarded pieces of gum are also ‘activists’, how remembering ancestry has political consequences, how thought is not a human feature, how bodies secrete time, and how slowing down in times of urgency makes sense in specific circumstances – especially now.

The Emergence Network surfaces at a time when there seems to be a felt need for ‘alternative’ modes of engaging with our more troubling realities. What we offer are ways of diving into the cracks in our skins, processes that allow us notice that there are other items on the menu. That there are other places of power.

Art by:
David Scott Myers
@red_wizard_collage
Our work is to make more room available for movement – to emancipate action and responsiveness from its narrow humanist confines. Our approach takes for granted the fact that humans can no longer be centralized in our conceptions of change – and that, instead, we must begin to take into consideration the eco-cultural environments that are the conditions for our acting.
Our work is to facilitate conversations, curate assemblies, foster trans-disciplinary and trans-professional interactions, convene events that mobilize people into exploring the occluded and the invisible, and nurture regenerative practices that allow for other compelling questions and values to be articulated in the face of crisis.

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Mushroom is our newsletter keeping you in touch with what is unfolding with The Emergence Network, the state of our projects, and essays and stories from the edges. Sign up to join us on our adventures to the otherwise.

A Compelling Call to Action:

The times we abide in invite us to notice our usual patterns of responding to the world around us. Our curators are artists who understand that the ways we frame our problems are often the problem. We seek to act as ‘death doulas’ of the familiar, to help open up new modes of perception, engagement and responsiveness in a time of crisis. With your support, we are creating a broad coalition of ‘postactivists’ who are listening to the troubling call for other ways of acting with the world.
Please support TEN and our project curators to open up places of power in these times.
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Upcoming Events:

The Wilds Beyond Climate Justice – A Gathering at the End of Hope

may 31-june 4, 2020
Online

The Wilds Beyond Climate Justice is an experimental online event for us to engage in different kinds of activities, actions, and conversations that lie beyond Western dominant logic as it defines rational climate solutions. Part ceremony, part workshop, part arts project, The Wilds Beyond Climate Justice will bring together a community of people to mourn, vision, play, and open up places of power and imagination in one unique virtual gathering.

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CURATORS:
Karen Leu, Aerin Dunford, and Bayo Akomolafe

Coming Down to Earth:
A Conflict Transformation Webseries

Online

The Emergence Network is thrilled to host, in partnership with the Transition Movement Hubs, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and other organizations, “Coming Down to Earth,” an online summit to explore pathways towards regenerative cultures in a time of breakdown. The Summit will take place in June and will invite a global audience to explore the current ways of thinking and patterns of response around tension and conflict that keep us trapped in reproducing solutions that satisfy no one. We will then move towards exploring narratives about transforming and healing conflicts as we develop a greater understanding of our interconnectedness. Finally, we will discover many bodies of practice that can help us meet difficult tensions and conflicts arising in ways that are more healthy and regenerative. For more information, email nuno@emergencenetwork.org.

Curator:
Nuno da Silva

Projects:

Our theme for the 2020 cycle is called
'Meeting at the Crossroads'.

For 2020, we are emphasizing the public forum, un/learning exchanges, political forms of organizing that privilege the more-than-human, and decoloniality as climate justice. We are working with racial justice as an environmental concern; we are paralleling the party political structure by organizing meetups in small spaces, and therefore disputing the idea that climate agency resides in big funding and institutions alone. We are working with interfaith communities to address stewardship in these times of trouble. Without dismissing the near-inevitability of internet-mediated activities, we are underscoring the need for face-to-face encounters, for hands in dirt, for listening to trees, for sharing recipes of earth-based technologies among hubs of local inquiry.

Borderlands

Hospitality in the Margins

Kairos

We are in this Together

Vulture

Courting the Otherwise in a Time of Breakdown

Vunja

Indaba for the Otherwise
View Projects