Seeds of a Second Renaissance Issue 1 (Feb 2025) - Donna Haraway on Response-ability and Staying with the Trouble
Dip into Donna Haraway's ideas as relational medicine in our time of crisis and discover the latest events and opportunities in the field of inner-led change.
Welcome to Seeds of a Second Renaissance* – a newsletter for those exploring inner-led change towards radically wiser societies.
Whether you’re a seasoned traveller or new to these shores, each edition offers a bite-sized exploration of keystone ideas — and thinkers whose work you may wish to know more deeply. You’ll also find curated events, opportunities, and resources below.
Dip into… the ideas of Donna Haraway
This month, a brush with Donna Haraway: a leading interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of science and technology studies, feminist theory, animal studies, and environmental criticism. Haraway’s invitation to “stay with the trouble” and cultivate “response-ability” is relational medicine in our time of alienation and crisis.
“In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
~ Staying with the Trouble (2016), p.1
In The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), Haraway argues that identity and being itself are formed through “co-constitutive relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all” (p.12). This is the process of becoming-with – core to a worldview which sees that everything exists in relationship. Relationship, moreover, of multispecies interdependence: “entangle[ment in] a motley crowd of differentially situated species, including landscapes, animals, plants, microorganisms, people, and technologies” (When Species Meet, 2008, p.41).
Within this entanglement, the presence that Haraway urges us to cultivate is a radical inhabiting of our damaged world; at home in “the trouble of living and dying” (Staying with the Trouble, p.2.). In their future orientation, both hope and despair are incompatible with real attunement to the senses and the world around us – “to material semiotics, to mortal earthlings in thick copresence” (p.4).
Thus Haraway makes the case for response-ability – an agentic response to our crises that begins with our entanglement in them. Renouncing ‘human exceptionalism’ and becoming sensitive to others and the more-than-human world.
Response-ability starts with our present situation and surroundings; sensing into what’s needed, and preoccupied by neither hope nor despair. Not only do these states limit our connection to the present, but they also limit our agency. Whether we trust blindly that somehow everything will be okay, or believe that we’re doomed, it’s too easy to do nothing.
Beyond this paralysis, Haraway invites us to meet troubled reality just as it is, coming face-to-face with loss, death and, importantly, grief. She writes: “Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing” (Staying with the Trouble, p.39).
To appreciate ‘becoming-with’ entails grieving our impacts in our shared world and on our fellow inhabitants.
Inspired by Haraway, we might enquire:
How do we remain present to our times, not grasping for another time or place when things get knotty?
How do we avoid overwhelm, to remain responsive to the troubles we’re entangled in?
How do we assume responsibility in the sense of accountability – and cultivate our capacity to respond?
The influence of Donna Haraway is ever present in emerging work for inner-led change – both implicit and explicit. A residency series exploring collective and personal awakening for troubled times chose the name Sympoeisis; likewise a topic of enquiry for artist Cheryl Hsu. Meanwhile, Kainos is the new media platform from Rebel Wisdom’s Alexander Beiner; while Jamie Bristow and Rosie Bell seek to inhabit the “messy middle” between optimism and despair.
Explore the field of inner-led change…
A selection of events, opportunities, and resources recommended by friends and allies in the arena of inner-led regeneration.
👋 Help us to showcase the best opportunities and resources: suggest items to include by posting in the Events, Offers & Links or Jobs Board WhatsApp channels.
Upcoming Events
Limicon 2025: A Co-Created Convention for a Changing World
📍Online 📅 5 March-2 April 2025 🔗 https://www.limicon2025.com/
“Limicon is the fan convention of the liminal web, attracting practitioners, artists, sense-makers, ritual crafters, philosophers, community weavers, experimenters, builders, and enthusiasts in and around the liminal, integral, metamodern, game b, bildung, regen, and related scenes.”
Participants can propose and host sessions. Sessions scheduled so far include: Metamodern Spirituality Says What?; Sacred Ecology Experience; Dazed & Confused Trump 2.0; and Connectabowl: Community Tending. There's also the opportunity to get involved with shaping Limicon by joining their co-creation calls.
Education for Flourishing in a Time of Polycrisis and Second Renaissance
📍Harvard University, Cambridge, USA 📅 2 May 2025
“A transformative 1-day event focused on bridging education, systems change, and human flourishing. Together, we will explore how we can cultivate the capacities needed to respond to the polycrisis and catalyze a Second Renaissance.”
Life Itself Spring Gathering
📍Bergerac, France 📅 27 March-6 April 2025 🔗 Event page
“Connect with others who are interested in topics such as: paradigmatic social change; contemplative, relational, and embodied practices; community weaving; inner development; alternative economics and politics… and more…”.
A weekend Open Space gathering followed by a Community Co-working Week. You can join just for the weekend or for the full 10 days.
Opportunities
Climate Majority Project - Campaign Manager and Administrative Assistant
📅 Apply by 28 Feb 2025 🔗 Job post
Our friends at the Climate Majority Project (CMP) are hiring for two roles that will “help to shape and execute a campaign that aims to bring adaptation to the top of the UK’s national agenda.” The CMP encourages citizens from all walks of life to recognise their power and take meaningful, effective climate action, including measures for psycho-social resilience.
LEAP Program for Regenerative Leadership
📅 Apply by 28 Feb 2025 🔗 Details and Application form
Our friends at Oikos International are offering this free programme in skills for regenerative leadership. Eligibility: students and postdoctoral researchers enrolled in a Higher Education institution. The programme runs April-September 2025 and covers topics such as navigating conflict, healthy boundaries, and values alignment.
Second Renaissance Collective
📍Harvard University, Cambridge, USA 🔗 Apply to join
Boaz Feldman and Patricia Mou have co-initiated “The Second Renaissance Collective”: a group at Harvard University dedicated to waking up and showing up. The group meets monthly in person (Cambridge/Harvard) to read texts, reflect and practise (meditate) together. Some thinkers or traditions which may feature include: Charles Eisenstein, John Vervaeke, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Ken Wilber, Buddha, Joanna Macy, Zak Stein and more.
Inspiring Links & Resources
Kainos: A new media platform for imagining new futures
Kainos is a new alternative media platform launched by Alexander Beiner (co-founder of Rebel Wisdom). Kainos “tells stories that help people make sense of a time of upheaval and imagine new futures”. They “create films, articles and experiences that blend cultural sensemaking with hope, imagination and impact” and “explore popular culture, philosophy, psychology, alternative economics and spirituality in an ongoing inquiry in which Kainos members are active participants”.
Iain McGilchrist: New Substack
Earlier this month, Iain McGilchrist, an influential thinker in the emerging inner-led change space, launched a Substack. Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, literary scholar, philosopher and neuroscientist known for his seminal texts The Master and His Emissary (2009) and The Matter with Things (2021). His first post, ‘Metaphors can make you blind’, is about “when we can’t ‘see’ what we can’t see”.
Second Renaissance
*“Second Renaissance” is one way of framing current times as a period of civilisational crisis and potential renewal – and of pointing to an ecosystem of people and organisations working to catalyse the emergence of a new, regenerative, cultural paradigm. If you recognise terms like metacrisis, Metamodern, Regenerative, Liminal Web, Game B, Integral, conscious evolution and so on, then you’re on familiar ground. Explore the core thesis and theory of change in more detail here.
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Finally, we leave you with some…
Art to nourish the soul
Cat’s Cradle / String Theory by Baila Goldenthal speaks to the webs of interdependence in which we live: entangled, in play, and in collaboration.
Thank you for reading the inaugural issue of Seeds of a Second Renaissance.