Sara Buraya Boned, Ida Hiršenfelder (eds.): Degrowth and Progress (2021)

“Degrowth and Progress is the second in a series looking at other potential narratives for mapping our current landscape through redefining the social, political and economic terms of engagement. Following the e-publication Austerity and Utopia, L’Internationale Online presents a second collection of interventions to think through two apparently distant concepts. Artists, thinkers and researchers were invited to reflect on a dissimilar pair of themes as fertile ground for thought and proposition. With this new issue, we would like to pursue a path of reflection to interrogate the ambivalence of a possible progression of degrowth, and attempt to stage a hybrid scenario of speculative thought and action. This collection draws upon the complexity of ethical, ecological and political frameworks and reveals other perspectives on the current crisis through critical essays, storytelling, science fiction, biomorphic design, audiovisual traces of artistic practices and allegorical maps. Progress was the firstborn of modernity, a major promise of continuous development towards the perfection of ‘humankind’. But progress in whose name? To whose benefit? With the exclusion of whom? Progress towards what kind of model? The notion of progress, besides being Eurocentric and linked to colonialism, has been the ideological framework for liberalism itself. The ideal of a continuous, progressive and desirable advancement of civilisation has been reframed in recent decades with ‘sustainable development’. But isn’t sustainability a concept far too simplistic to be able to address real questions of poverty, exploitation, segregation, congestion, depletion of land, desertification, terraforming, or the mass extinction of species? Could we think in a different direction about progress?”

With essays by Vincent Liegey, Cristina Cámara, Vladan Joler, Ajda Pistotnik, Paula Pin Lage, Marta Echaves, and Ida Hiršenfelder, an interview with Silvia Federici by Sara Buraya Boned, and a conversation between Monica Narula and Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez moderated by Corina Oprea.

Publisher L’Internationale Online, 2021
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License
ISBN 9789151931708
167 pages

Publisher

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