Welcome!
Hi! Welcome to Convivial Means, and thank you for your interest. What you’re reading now is something of an introductory post, talking a little bit about myself, this project, my reasons for working on it, and what you can expect down the line. It’s here so I don’t waste your time – so that you can decide off the bat if this content will be up your alley or not.
Who?
To begin with… who am I? A valid question, but sadly one I’m not particularly adept at answering. In the grand scheme of things of course, the answer is unimportant. For the purposes of this newsletter, however, the most relevant information is probably about my background and experiences and what they mean in terms of the knowledge and perspective I bring to my writing. At the moment, I would call myself a researcher, or perhaps a scholar-organizer or scholar-activist. The academic component of that is a fairly new addition, however, just the next step in an evolution of interests, worldview, and, for lack of a better word, purpose.
In terms of research specifically, I am interested in understanding the ways in which various governance, ownership, and material (technological, geographical, etc) formations might facilitate improved social and ecological wellbeing, with a focus on their impacts on society’s relationship to resources, particularly energy. This interest, and perhaps more significantly the ways in which I engage with it, has been shaped by prior experience. I was an engineer working in ‘clean-tech’ until I realized the ecological challenges we face are not primarily technological in nature; at which point I focused more on political organizing, up until I realized that my personality was not particularly well-suited to engage in organizing work full-time. The result: a split, working with social movements to collaboratively produce socially situated and useful knowledge, and participating directly in community building and organizing where I can.
This combination of experiences and the influence on my perspective that they have had have led me to have quite a diverse set of interests. In terms of somewhat simplistic labels, that includes ecology, sociology, politics, philosophy, economics, and more. I don’t like to think of these as separate arenas of understanding, however, and a lot of my thinking recently has been about integrating them; digging a bit deeper to understand foundational, underlying connections. This project is part of that effort.
Intent
I hope for this newsletter / blog / whatever to serve four main functions. The first is essentially a personal, internal one: it’s a space for me to work through and interrogate my own perspective and ideas. Sometimes my brain’s jumbled. Sometimes I need to write things down, put my reasoning down on paper and read it back to myself to see if it actually makes sense. I do that regularly anyway; this is a way of doing it such that there may be other benefits.
Secondly, by putting some of these thoughts and arguments out there on a public platform, I hope to challenge existing narratives and ideas and prompt some degree of much-needed critical discussion on important topics that I feel do not get due attention. I would never say that my perspective is 100%, definitively correct (my own views are constantly evolving, and anyway, I’m not that confident), but I think that it’s generally worthwhile to present viewpoints that critique harmful orthodoxies. Contributing to public discussions in this way has the dual benefits of adding nuance to the conversation as well as exposing me to viewpoints I may not have come across before, which in turn can support my own growth.
Thirdly, I also intend for this to be a platform that can serve to amplify the voices that tend to get silenced. I’m well aware that, for the most part, another substack composed of essays by a relatively comfortable academic is not something anyone truly radical actually wants or needs. Epistemic injustice and violence are very real, and have shaped essentially all of human history and all knowledge production. I can’t single-handedly fix that of course, but I can try to avoid contributing to it; to that end I will try to promote other voices where possible – through interviews, collaborations, guest pieces, etc.
Finally, and this is the one I hate the most: career. As a person who is at least in part an aspiring academic and writer, having a body of work that I can share with others is probably useful. In trying to find academic work or writing contracts or something similar, having examples of my writing style, evidence of knowledge, and demonstration of analytical skills would likely be beneficial. I don’t like to have to think about my labor and interests in the context of a life-supporting career, and maybe one day we’ll live in a world where that’s not necessary, but for now it’s reality and I hope that this writing project may contribute to that.
Content
Right off the bat: this is not really a newsletter. More like a blog? A collection of essays? Who knows. I don’t know what I’d call it. To start off with at least, the content will likely be mostly essays/articles, aimed at a general audience that is of a perhaps more radical persuasion and passingly familiar with the ideas being discussed. There is a potential for other forms of content to be included down the line, depending on feedback. Maybe audio or video segments? And of course, if anyone would like to develop a guest piece, the format would be entirely their choice.
Getting into a bit more substance, I think it’s worth talking briefly here about the values and perspective that’s going to be represented by my writing. And a good place to start with that is the name of this project: Convivial Means. The short answer for why I chose that name is because those two words together do a pretty good job of summing up my views and principles. Both words contain a lot in a little and are worth digging into a bit more deeply.
Conviviality is a word that has been developed and used in several different contexts, and so the definitions vary by language, by geography, by community, etc. But roughly, my understanding of conviviality is as an idealized socio-ecological formation consisting of relationships between distinct but interconnected and cooperative entities. In practice, conviviality to me means working towards greater social and ecological wellbeing in ways that value cooperation and interdependence as well as autonomy and heterogeneity. In a way, the concept of conviviality seems very similar to the Zapatismo idea of ‘Un Mundo Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos‘ – ‘a world in which many worlds fit.’
Means, when attached to conviviality then, takes on dual connotations. The first is definitional: what really is conviviality, in a conceptual sense? I gave an extremely brief explanation here, which is just a summation of my understanding. As it is a pretty major pillar of my worldview, however, I’ll likely dig deeper into the idea, certainly in the course of writing various pieces, or possibly even in its own essay. The second way to think about means is as methods or praxis, such as in the concept of means and ends. What, concretely, might conviviality entail in terms of grounded organization and action? Practicality, and particularly prefigurative, values-based praxis, is very important to me. This duality gets to the heart of my intention, which is to combine abstract, conceptual discussion with a useful analysis of grounded reality.
So, to get to the meat of the matter, this project is, as of now, planned to essentially be a collection of essays discussing specific ideas or concrete issues using these principles as an analytical guide. The first actual piece likely to be posted here, for an example, is an examination of the interaction between anarchism and degrowth, with a focus on understanding how the state, capital, and growth imperative are related. By nature, that piece is likely to be fairly abstract, but I intend for the next one to be much more concrete: an analysis of specific technologies with relation to these principles. So, you’ll be getting a mix. As for other specific essay topics… you’ll just have to wait and see! Though, realistically, I might post ideas on Twitter or elsewhere to gauge interest and see what else comes up. A slave to the discourse and all that.
In any case, there are are several general themes you can expect to come up regularly:
- Ecology
- Anarchism
- Commons/commoning
- Resource stewardship, especially with regard to energy
- Degrowth/post-growth
- Governance
- (Anti)colonialism
- Praxis and ‘revolution’
- Academia, epistemic injustice, and ‘knowledge production’
- Science and vulgar scientism
- Complexity
Caveats!
There are a couple of things readers should keep in mind. The first is boring old logistics, specifically a content schedule. In short: I don’t have one planned. Yet, anyway. This project is obviously something that I care about, but there are other things I’m trying to work on and figure out as well. For now, the basic idea is this: I’ll be working on something, and when it’s done, I’ll post it. Then I’ll probably take a quick break before starting on the next essay, and when it’s done, I’ll post that one. Rinse and repeat. In addition to the other variables that life provides, these pieces will likely vary in length and depth, so I can’t really promise a consistent schedule. I’ll try to provide updates though, both through this platform as well as likely on Twitter.
The second consideration is one of positionality. As I mentioned, I have ongoing connections to institutional academia and grassroots organizing spaces; these relationships obviously shape my perspective and readers should be aware of that. I am not neutral, and I do not strive to be. I do not think that it’s necessary to be neutral in order to be rigorous in one’s analysis, so long as one acknowledges the influence of experience and social situatedness on one’s work. And I will always strive to include an analysis of positionality in everything I write. That being said, I’m human, I do make mistakes (all the time!) and readers should always view my writing through a critical lens.