Afternoon masterclass on degrowth visions and critiques: an escape hatch from the quarter or mid-life crisis you never wanted
This masterclass is planned as an in-person event.
We encourage CEU community members to register for the event to estimate attendance and registration is required for external guests.
Please check the COVID safety rules here for entering the building.
We used to say that degrowth provided a sober vision of reaching mid-century with everyone alive and seas not rising over our ankles. But then “sobriety” was hijacked by the maniacs to describe anything that doesn’t rock the boat for them - keep the economy ticking and hope for the best. So let’s lose our inhibitions towards plans for survival for all, on trusting our own devices, on radically loving thy neighbors - on intellectually engaging with local justice and global sustainability beyond recycling labels. Let’s learn about degrowth and strategies for an off your face, eyes wide open plunge into a meaningful and free midcentury!
Sustainable CEU invites you to this masterclass (a way to avoid saying workshop or inviting you to a lecture on what is wrong with today) where Vincent Liegey and Mladen Domazet will offer their unique introductions to degrowth theory and practice. Following short and peculiar openings inviting you at first to be serious about de-growth (odrast in Slavic rendering, postwachstum in German, nemnövekedés in Hungarian), they will take you through a series of steps illustrating how degrowth research today speaks to most of the obstacles you at first imagine. They’ll show you how to think without fear about frugal abundance and conviviality, and how to celebrate growing without metastasizing. And finally how to quantify, deliberate and strategize through degrowth doughnut visualizations - connecting what’s good today with the great transformations of tomorrow. If you’re serious about mid-century climate stabilization, biodiversity preservation and social justice, you’ll have to consider degrowth in your research work. This crash course will help you avoid pitfalls that Noam Chomsky stumbled into without having to imbibe even a sip of Milton Friedman’s poison.
About our guest moderators:
Dr Mladen Domazet is a research director at the Institute for Political Ecology in Zagreb, and currently a Senior Research Fellow at Corvinus University in Budapest. He has been part of the European degrowth movement for almost a decade now, and is one of the organizers of the forthcoming 9th International Degrowth Conference in Zagreb. His research publications present degrowth as a combination of philosophy, science and a meaningful educational curriculum; with a healthy dose of public support for degrowth ideology. Today he works on the doughnuts.
Vincent Liegey is an engineer, interdisciplinary researcher and one of the coordinators of the international degrowth conferences and the Observatoire de la Décroissance. He is the co-author of several books on Degrowth including Exploring Degrowth: A Critical Guide (Plutot Press, 2020) and Décroissance, Fake or Not (Tana Editions, 2022), Sobriété (la vraie) Mode d’emploi (Tana Edition, 2023).
He is also a coordinator of Cargonomia — a center for research and experimentation on degrowth, a social cooperative for sustainable logistical solutions and local food distribution using cargo-bikes in Budapest.