KINSHIP: An Exploration Into Being Together

Tyson is an academic, arts critic, and researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. As an indigenous person, Tyson looks at global systems from a unique perspective, one tied to the natural & spiritual world. He is the author of ‘Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World’. He carves traditional tools and weapons & also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne.

Minna is a Nigerian, Finnish and Swedish writer, feminist theorist and author.

Douglas is the host of the Team Human podcast & author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, & culture, including, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, & the novel Ecstasy Club. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. He lives in New York, and lectures about media, society, and economics around the world.

Bayo Akomolafe (PhD) is Chief Curator and Executive Director of The Emergence Network.

Charles Eisenstein is a world-renowned teacher, speaker, and writer focusing on themes of civilisation, consciousness, money, and human cultural evolution.

Charlotte is a writer, editor & co-director of the Dark Mountain Project. A former journalist, she has co-founded several collaborative writing projects to foster radical cultural change, including the grassroots newspaper, Transition Free Press. Her most recent book, 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth, was published by Two Ravens Press. She currently creates performances & written work that explore myth as a tool for navigating times of collapse.

Andreas is a Berlin based author & independent scholar. He has degrees in Marine Biology & Cultural Studies, having collaborated with theoretical biologist Francisco Varela in Paris. Andreas’ work is focusing on a re-evaluation of our understanding of the living. He is proposing to understand organisms as subjects & hence the biosphere as a meaning-creating & poetic reality. Andreas is the author of Enlivenment. Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene, & Sharing Life: The Ecopolitics of Reciprocity.

Adah is a polymath, anti-disciplinary artist, tech futurist & activist who’s work explores the anatomy of transformation. Adah’s work sits at the intersection of living systems & indigenous community practices, & digital and emerging technologies, all under the philosophical idea and systems framework that she developed called cyborg shamanism. She is Artist in Residence at The Santa Barbara Centre for Art Science & Technology. In 2021 and 2020, she was long-listed as one of the Most Influential Women in UK Technology.

Stephen is a teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, and founder of Orphan Wisdom, a teaching house for skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. He makes books, tends farm and mends broken handles and fences, succumbs to interviews, teaches and performs internationally.

Gavin is Executive Editor at the Center for Humans & Nature. His writing is an entangled in ongoing conversation between humans, our nonhuman kin, & the animate landscape. He is the co-editor, with Robin Wall Kimmerer & John Hausdoerffer, of the five-volume series, Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, & the author of The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds. Gavin currently resides in the ancestral lands of the Chumash people in San Luis Obispo, California.

Brontë is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson).

Jeremy, described by George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” is an author & speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilisation’s existential crisis. His book, The Web of Meaning, offers a coherent & intellectually solid foundation for a worldview based on connectedness that could lead humanity to a sustainable, flourishing future. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth.

Tiokasin Ghosthorse is from the Cheyenne River Lakota (Sioux) Nation of South Dakota. He is the host of First Voices Indigenous Radio on Pacific Radio. Tiokasin has been described as a ‘spiritual agitator, natural rights organiser, Indigenous thinking process educator and a community activator’.

Nora is an award-winning filmmaker, writer & educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute. An international lecturer, researcher & writer, Nora produced the award-winning documentary, An Ecology of Mind, a portrait of her father, Gregory Bateson. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, & information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems. Her book, Small Arcs of Larger Circles, is a revolutionary personal approach to the study of systems & complexity.

Justine (she/her) is a lover of birds & all things wild, a student of water & love, a community activist, council carrier, & rites of passage guide-in-training. She serves on the Core Teams of Walking Water and Education for Racial Equity has trained with the School of Lost Borders and Tamera Healing Biotope 1 and is a member of Beyond Boundaries. She carries and offers practices and skills that strengthen our capacities to show up with open hearts and courageous bodes during these uncertain times on planet earth.

Tim is a British anthropologist & Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He received his BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 1970, and his PhD in 1976. For his doctoral research he carried out ethnographic fieldwork among the Skolt Saami of northeastern Finland, & the resulting monograph (‘The Skolt Lapps Today’, 1976) was a study of the ecological adaptation, social organisation & ethnic politics of this small minority community under conditions of post-war resettlement.

Sophie is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, & ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Lunar Kings, Lichenized Lovers, Transpecies Magicians, and Rhizomatic Harpists Heal the Masculine is forthcoming in 2022. She is currently researching a mythopoetic exploration of ecology and queerness in the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde.

GTDF are a trans-disciplinary collective of researchers, artists, educators, students & Indigenous knowledge keepers. Their collaborative practices bring together concerns related to racism, colonialism, unsustainability, climate change, biodiversity loss, economic instability, mental health crises, & intensifications of social & ecological violence. The focus of the work is on building stamina, capacity & dispositions for painful work (self-and world-unmaking) through artistic & educational experiments that can help us to hold space for difficult conversations.