What does it mean to belong? What does it mean to be in relationship with the ever-unfurling world we find ourselves a part of? What, exactly, is community? And who do we really mean when we say “we”?

KINSHIP is an exploration into being together in a time when being apart has fractured our relationship to self, other, and the more-than-human in ways that have left us painfully adrift. It is a timely collective inquiry into how community, relationality, and belonging can revitalise our sense of aliveness as creatures of and participants in this animate earth, and how such a renewal might influence our actions towards greater flourishing.

Kinship is a way of relating that asks us to go beyond extracting value from the “other”. It is relationship for relationships sake, and for the sake of life itself. It is a form of relationship that acknowledges the deeper workings of reality by operating on the same principles as the very breath which keeps us alive: reciprocity, emergence, and sensuous awareness.

Whether or not you have unorthodox relationships with rocks, or find your wings in the world of words, we invite you to explore kinship with us, and reconceive relationship in the contexts we find ourselves in.

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The Course Content

Community is the vessel, the social infrastructure of life, relationality is the alchemical catalyst, the yoke of togetherness, and belonging is the meaning and magic amidst it all.

Together we will look at how these three elements enable a transformative form of relationship to arise, one that is regenerative, life-affirming, and sacred to those who enter into it: kinship.

Why is kinship a more powerful frame through which to view relationships than simply saying “everything is connected”? “Everything is connected” is (partially) true, but in the words of Donna Haraway, “nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something”. Kinship offers us ways to connect through the context of place. This is profoundly important in a time when the abstract notion of the “global village” might challenge our capacity for care, and more crucially, action.

We want to ask the questions: When we are not indigenous, what are we? How can we belong? Why do we find it so challenging in the globalised consumerist world to practice healthy relationships and community? Can kinship arise through online relationships and those we form in demanding and fractured environments like cities? How do skewed power dynamics affect the quality of our relatedness? How might a sense of kinship help us navigate polarisation, and how might it encourage us to move beyond our deeply held views? How, ultimately, can kinship orient us towards greater individual and collective flourishing?

We hope participants will see that kinship is not some fantasy-driven “over there” remedy, but instead is an immediate possibility, open to all persons, regardless of their geographical location or background. This is why we’re keen to explore possibilities for kinship in “unlikely” contexts, such as through science, technology, in cities and so on (as well as in “nature-based” contexts).

We don’t claim to know exactly what kinship is, how exactly to get there, but we do hope to gather enough diverse perspectives so that we might come closer to whichever truth can lead us all towards greater flourishing. This course is less about “we know the answer and we’re going to teach it to you”, but is instead an attempt to open up the necessary questions, collectively. It will be educative, but it’s primary aim is to midwife generative inquiry, and raise the signal on the questions that need to be asked about our relationships in the context of modernity.

The aim of the course is to reconceive kinship in the context of modernity, meaning we want to question its relevance to our current predicament, and to the minds of those to whom kinship may at first not seem “natural”. Kinship, we believe, does not necessarily equate to sameness, niceness, lack of conflict, or forgoing individuality. We want to explore being kin in conflict, and how compassion can show up in different ways.

We recognise the numerous possible avenues we could follow with this course in terms of topics and questions, and we hope to expand this offering in future. For now, we have chosen to focus on several key “building blocks” for relationship, each of which has been raised time and time again in a variety of conversations about “what to do next?” regarding our predicament, particularly in relation to collective action problems.

We hope this course will stand, first and foremost, for nuance. In the spirit of kinship, we invite perspectives that may challenge us, and we also invite those that serve as balm to our individual and collective wounds.

The Course Format

The course runs from 15th March – 5th May 2022, and sessions run for 2 – 2.5 hours. Each week, we will have a different theme, with 2 – 3 sessions each. The themes include: Why Kinship, The Politics of Relationship, Relational Ecosystems, The Individual, The Community, The More-Than-Human, Relational Imaginaries, Being & Becoming Kin.

Collective Inquiry Sessions are every other Thursday and last for 1.5 hours, which are shared spaces in which we dive deep into the previous weeks’ themes and begin to embody the principles of kinship in our online community (and beyond). These sessions are designed to midwife generative inquiry, both individually and collectively, and serve as a virtual campfire, around which we will gather, discuss, reflect, embody, collaborate, create, and practice.

Sessions will be held via Zoom. Recordings, readings, practices and the forum will be available via the Kinship Mighty Network.

Session Dates

WEEK 1: Tuesday March 15, 6:00 – 7:45pm UK/GMT
* Gavin Van Horn: The Crisis of Belonging
* Jeremy Lent: Why Kinship?
* Charlotte Du Cann: A Story of Kinship

WEEK 2: Tuesday March 22, 6:00 – 9:00PM UK/GMT
* Douglas Rushkoff: Being Human is a Team Sport
* brontë velez & Justine Epstein: Ritual Reparations & “Commemorative Justice”

WEEK 3: Tuesday March 29, 6:00 – 8:00PM UK/BST
* Adah Paris: Belonging in the Cyborg Age
* Gavin Van Horn: Place & Urban Space

WEEK 4: Tuesday April 5, 6:00 – 8:45PM UK/BST
* Minna Salami: The Illusion of the Individual
* Andreas Weber: The Paradox of the Individual – A Biopoetic Perspective
* Charles Eisenstein: Living with Ourselves, Together

WEEK 5: Tuesday April 12, 6:00 – 8:00PM UK/BST
* Tim Ingold: Kinship & Community – An Anthropological Perspective
* Nora Bateson: TBA
* Carolina Duque & Vanessa Andreotti: Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures

WEEK 6: Tuesday April 19, 6:00 – 8:00PM UK/BST
* Andreas Weber: Animism – Life as Reciprocity and Inwardness
* Tiokasin Ghosthorse: Contextualising Indigenous Languages for Troubled Times
* Andy Letcher: TBA

WEEK 7: Tuesday April 26, 6:00 – 8:00PM UK/BST
* Sophie Strand: Telling Our Way Home
* Tyson Yunkaporta: TBA
* Stephen Jenkinson & Charlotte Du Cann: On Myth & Kinship

WEEK 8: Tuesday May 3, 5:45 – 7:30PM UK/BST
* Bayo Akomolafe: One Never Makes the World Alone
* Gavin Van Horn: Kinship is a Verb