Circle 9: Degrowth and Exnovation
Future sessions
2025:
- Winter Session “Exnovation and Degrowth: how do we terminate the fossil economy?”
24th – 26th April. Copenhagen, Denmark
Registration is now closed | Program (TBA)
- Summer Session: “Building community in the midst of collapse: organizing towards degrowth futures”
21st – 28th July. Jyväskylä, Finland
Registration is open.
Summer Session 2025
Building community in the midst of collapse: organizing towards degrowth futures
Location: Jyväskylä, Finland
Dates: July 21st-28th, 2025
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.”
― Ruha Benjamin
How can we build community in the midst of collapse? What new socio-ecological structures of co-living can we create together, while also dismantling the fossil capitalist economy? In this summer study circle, we are calling for abstracts, papers, perspectives, statements of interest, essays, literary and artistic contributions on the topic of organizing and community building for post-growth communities. We welcome contributions from academics, artists, writers, NGOs, social movements, and anybody interested in participating. We are interested in discussing (past, present and future) ways of organizing together (through neighborhood associations, decentralized networks, social movements, and new urban or rural spaces) in ways that transcend the growth imperative, and help contribute to the end of fossil capitalism.
In the face of climate collapse, how are people organizing locally along degrowth principles of sufficiency and conviviality? What challenges do we face, and what tactics can we pursue in establishing ways of living that allow dismantling of harmful infrastructures and industries, acting and resisting that are not tied to fossil capital? How can we foster community wellbeing in the midst of collapse, while reducing and ultimately ending our dependencies on extractive industries? What connections can be built between (human and more-than-human) beings? What alliances can be made between academia and social movements? Between State, non-State and anti-State actors? What concrete initiatives already exist on the ground, combining community-building and resistance to capital? And how can we further foster “care in resistance”, while preserving connections between local peoples and their land?
We are particularly (but not exclusively) interested in ongoing projects and struggles in Nordic countries, including community resistance towards intensive forestry; volunteer forest conservation and peatland restoration; agroecology at high latitudes; chains of extractivism that start, end or run through Nordic countries; resistance against Nordic-based corporations that drive extractivism and exploitation in other parts of the world; Indigenous and local struggles of communities in the Nordic countries and the Arctic.
Suggested themes
Some suggested themes are below, but they are not exclusive, and we welcome other thematic contributions that do not fit any of the below:
- Paths towards degrowth community-building: critically studying instances of “nowtopias” (Kallis et al. 2019) in and beyond the Nordic countries; best practices, guidelines, strategies, tactics, success stories, challenges, obstacles, etc. Varieties, processes and examples of economic democracy and autonomous governance within degrowth communities.
- Communities of resistance against industrial forestry: Forest conservation as “defense of the commons”; Convivial vs. “fortress” conservation (Martinez-Alier 2023); Envisioning modes of forest conservation in line with “survival ecology” (Gardner and Bullock 2021); Exnovation and termination of the forest industry; Building connections with the more-than-human world – how can the extractive and non-sustainable forestry industry be dismantled? What strategies and tactics can be pursued towards this goal, at various levels of actions and geographies? What concrete spaces have already been won from the forestry industry, and how are they evolving towards socio-ecological reconstruction? Lessons learnt from Indigenous resistance (e.g. Inari conflict).
- Physical spaces for degrowth communities: De-urbanization, neo-urbanism and neo-ruralism; Small farm futures (Smaje 2020); Federated and decentralized governance; Horizontalism in urban planning; Municipal organizing and communalism (Bookchin 2006); Depavement movements; Exnovation in urban and rural transport and provisioning systems.
- Movement-building to resist electro-capitalism: resistance to discourses, tactics and policies that drive extraction of natural resources (often from impoverished, Indigenous and/or Global South communities) for energy infrastructure and techno-gadget consumerism; efforts to dismantle surveillance and AI capitalism; movements against extractivist metal-mining; critical investigation of chains of extractivism in the Nordic and Baltic countries; transnational movement-building; Examples from Sami resistance, Elokapina, and others.
- Convivial community-based leisure: reconceptualising tourism, leisure and holidays in light of climate collapse; exploring the slow violence of the tourism industry; rethinking tourism consumption and extraction; approaches to tourism degrowth in the Arctic or other sparsely populated areas; approaches to de-touristification of local spaces; the role of proximity and community-based leisure time; human and more-than-human narratives of tourism in the post-growth era; relational and intergenerational approaches in community-based tourism; strategies towards collective appropriation, decommodification and downsizing of the tourism industry (Murray et al. 2023)
Continued work from previous session
During the summer sessione, we will also continue on the work we plan to start in our winter/spring session earlier this year in Copenhagen (April 2025) including:
- Building a network of Nordic exnovation: How can we best connect groups in Nordic countries harboring knowledge about dismantling fossil spaces and restructuring them into thriving spaces for people and nature? Following on our work from the winter session, we will continue developing a network of researchers, workers, political actors and activists centered on the common goal of dismantling fossil and extractive infrastructures
- Review / database of past and ongoing exnovative actions: How has exnovation taken place in the past? This will involve the review of existing literature on the techniques for as well as social and ecological impacts of decommissioning, deactivating and terminating fossil-driven, extractive infrastructure and machinery. This could result in the construction of an open-access online database or map.
Joint cross-circle workshop
During the summer, our study circle plans to have a joint 1-day workshop with NSU Study Circle 7 (Act, React & Reflect: Meta-perspectives on climate change knowledge) on the topic of combining theory and practice in the enactment of sustainability transitions. Members of both circles will discuss ways in which our perspectives, ideas and knowledge intersect and can be brought into dialogue with each other.
Attendees of the summer circle are also welcome to attend any of the other study circles that will happen concurrently during the session. NSU study circles explore widely diverse topics within the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences and provide a cross-disciplinary forum for debating topics that are not already established in universities, thereby contributing to the initiation of new research agendas and alternative perspectives. For a full list of the study circles, see here.
Logistical information
This study circle will be one of nine study circles that will take place concurrently, during the Nordic Summer University’s Summer Session 2025. The session will take place in Jyväskylä, Finland, between the 21st and the 28th of July. Both adults and children are welcome to attend the session. In addition to the study circles, the summer session will also include the possibility to attend artistic interventions, poetry readings, documentary viewings and excursions. More details and the price range for the full week including lodging, meals, membership and the program are here.
If you are a member of NSU already, you will get a discounted price. Please contact the arrangement committee (arrkom@nsuweb.org) for more details. Scholarships are available for a limited number of people. If you intend to apply for a scholarship, please notify us when signing up.
ECTS credits for PhD students. Through NSU, participants in the session will be granted a letter recommending ECTS credits for participation (1 ECTS for attendance of the session OR 2 ECTS for attendance and presentation of a topic of the student’s choice, that is relevant to the circle).
Deadlines
March 15: Early bird price ends
April 1: Deadline for registration
May 15: Last day for payment of NSU booking fees
TO SIGN UP, CLICK ON THIS LINK.
About Study Circle 9 – Degrowth and Exnovation
How to safely dismantle a coal mine or an oil rig, and re-use their parts for something better? What could existing fossil spaces be replaced with, in a way that benefits people and planet? In this NSU Study Circle, we aim to study ways to facilitate, support and carry out exnovation, meaning the democratic down-scaling and termination of harmful technologies, institutions and practices that contribute to climate, ecological and societal breakdown. We focus on exnovation as a key concept within the broader degrowth paradigm. Degrowth involves the equitable and just down-scaling of production and consumption, undertaken through democratic processes, in order to bring our societies back into balance with the living world, while improving well-being. Exnovation plays an important role in this downscaling: we urgently need creative and democratically engaging ways to undo all the structures that fossil capital has created to make our lives dependent on its unlimited growth.
