Superonda Talk
Architecture et Environnement
Monday 31rst May 2021, 6.30pm
“To Re-enchant the World”
Starhawk (EN)
How can we envision the world that we want? How did the world become disenchanted—reduced to dead material devoid of inherent value? To address the great ecological and social meltdowns of our time, we need a worldview that sees all of life as interconnected and interdependent, sharing a field of consciousness. Starhawk proposes frameworks, ethics and principles that can guide us in designing a world infused with spirit and founded on justice, where we approach nature with reverence, humility, and wonder.
&
“I will life to go on”
Isabelle Stengers (FR)
Isabelle Stengers, who translated and introduced Starhawk’s “Quel monde voulons-nous ?”, will emphasise how struck she was by the importance of the word “envision” that she uses. There is nothing contemplative, but a desire, for more than forty years, to let oneself be guided by the life that must go on, and to bring this life to places where conflicts and mistrust threaten or make us forget interdependencies and interconnections.
Biographies
Starhawk is a writer, activist, permaculture designer and teacher, and a leading voice for ecofeminism and earth-based spirituality. She is the author of thirteen books on earth based spirituality and activism, including The Spiral Dance, The Earth Path, and The Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups, on group dynamics and social permaculture, and her novels, The Fifth Sacred Thing and City of Refuge.
Together with director Donna Read Cooper, Starhawk has worked on five major documentaries, including the Goddess Trilogy for the National Film Board of Canada and Permaculture: The Growing Edge.
Starhawk directs Earth Activist Training, http://earthactivisttraining.org, which teaches the tools of regenerative design with a grounding in spirit, a focus on social permaculture, organizing and activism. Her website is http://starhawk.org, and she is on Twitter @Starhawk17 and Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StarhawkAuthor/.
Isabelle Stengers, professor emeritus of the University of Brussels. Her work first focused on the problem of physics confronted with the problem of irreversibility, (with I. Prigogine La nouvelle alliance, 1979, and Entre le temps et l’éternité, 1988), then on the question of modern sciences (L’invention des sciences modernes, 1993, and Histoire de la chimie, 1993, written with B.Bensaude-Vincent. She set out to escape the role of the dominating model of the experimental sciences by focusing on the diversity of the sciences, their conflicting relationships and their social, economic and political role. This reflection on the sciences has been extended, with the notion of practice and the ecology of practices, to all collective activities that produce knowledge (Cosmopolitiques, 1997, La Vierge et le neutrino, 2006). She also explores the possibilities of a speculative pragmatics, both in the political domain (La sorcellerie capitaliste, with Philippe Pignarre, 2005; Au temps des catastrophes, 2009) and in the philosophical domain (Penser avec Whitehead, 2002). Within this same framework, she published Les faiseuses d’histoires with Vinciane Despret in 2011 and Une autre science est possible! in 2013 and Réactiver le sens commun in 2020.
In 2003 she introduced Starhawk to the French-speaking public in her afterword to Science, magie et politique (since republished under the title Rêver l’obscur) and in 2019 she translated her Quel monde voulons-nous? preceded by an essay ‘Magie et résurgence‘.
Illustrations by Gaëtan Amossé