Our Initial Vision for a Community of Practice

(1) A Community of Practice:

Our proposed platform is a Community of Practice for ‘Cultural Creatives’2 to animate and curate an island-wide conversation on emergent ‘social imaginaries’ in support of the wellbeing economy. For our practice-based inquiry we shall draw from our island histories, narratives, mythologies and ways of knowing that are often first questioned, explored and generated in the arts and performance, in music and song, verse, movement, film, theatre, writing and other socially engaged forms. Consider how the words of Seamus Heaney’s translation of The Cure at Troy (Sophocles, fifth century BCE) have travelled the world along with the imaginary that gave rise to the practices of the Anglo-Irish peace process and the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement:

From The Cure At Troy

Human beings suffer,

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Can fully right a wrong

Inflicted and endured.

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge.

Believe that further shore

Is reachable from here.

Believe in miracle

And cures and healing wells.

(Seamus Heaney, Trans. Faber and Faber 2018)

Our inquiry will also engage with peers across the global WEAll network, including a number of experiments already engaging the arts. ‘We can only do it by harnessing art, poetry, music, design, dance, storytelling and creativity.’ WEAll were actively involved, for example, in disseminating a piece of music composed with the express purpose of inviting choirs, street bands and community groups to participate in a collective musical response to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) held in Glasgow in November 2021. The piece, ‘Enough is Enough’ was sung and produced by the award-winning folk musician and theatre maker, Karine Polwart, with Oi Musica and the Soundhouse Choir.

In the words of George Po, ‘unless a social movement as a network develops into communities of practice it cannot become a system of influence. Communities of practice are of vital importance because, through them, people grow the necessary capabilities and structures that enable a new system to emerge – not as a social movement taking over institutions by force but by growing into a system of influence and thus becoming the new mainstream, making old structures obsolete.’ (George Po, 2018)

The point at which a new system or systems emerge can never be predicted - nor should it be. It is the sudden appearance of a system that has real power and influence. Pioneering and prefigurative experiments embodying, anticipating and enabling new values and practices that have hovered at the periphery suddenly become the norm. These regenerative practices, developed by courageous communities, networks and individuals, contain the seeds of compelling futures, sometimes half- articulated responses to the great ‘signs of our times’, encompassing our deepest values and desires to live the lives we never dared hope for, cultivated in the fields of struggle, art and contemplation.

(2) Narratives that move: movement building

Inspired by the work of Marshall Ganz, we understand that social change and movement-building are closely linked to the power of story and narrative. Stories enter those places that move us…It is an understanding that has grown out of Ganz’s own experience with the civil rights movement in the United States, an understanding that would deeply inform the music and rhythms of the civil rights movement in Derry and elsewhere in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s.

The Ganz approach foregrounds the role of narratives and social imaginaries in transmitting values and new understandings that are enduring and that can act as the bases for the necessary interplay of individual and societal change. For Ganz5 the purposeful social action behind every successful movement is built on the responses to two key questions that activists and creatives must put to themselves: ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’

The ‘How?’ question is addressed by strategic considerations and is often bound up with questions of resourcing and discernment of opportunities for intervention and maximum leverage.The answer to the ‘Why?’ question is where it gets interesting. The question of ‘Why?’ one becomes involved in a new social movement or in responding to its invitations, engages us at the level of why an issue matters to us, why we fundamentally care, and an engagement with our most precious values.

It is in posing these questions to ourselves – and our potential constituencies – that the role of narrative comes to the fore. And narratives are key at this moment of societal transition driven by socio-ecological ‘signs of the times’. The very word transition – including ‘the Just Transition’ – implies a transition from prevailing or dominant narratives to new, enlivening stories, even if these are only partially articulated and contain elements of uncertainty. Joanna Macy has identified three areas or fields of action with distinct qualities: ‘Holding actions’ that consist of conventional oppositional actions, and refusals to tolerate immediate sources of injustice and ecological degradation; ‘Structural’ or ‘System’ change, which consists of work to build and pre-figure new societal forms and economies that enable new ways of being in the world and ‘being with’; and ‘shifts in consciousness’ or the ‘inner work’ that ensures that our transformations are comprehensive, non-dual and generative in every sense: generative of new meanings, identities, and stories that are intimately grounded in the local, the just, and the rhythms and cycles of the planet and the ‘more-than-human’.

The transition or transitions can be characterized as a movement from a prevailing or ‘Dominant System’ to an ‘Emergent System’ (below), a journey that requires unprecedented acts of imagination, creativity, solidarity and cultivation.

(3) Ethos and Values: Connection and Care

Our Community of Practice will be sustained and cultivated by a continuation of our practice of ‘deep dives’, combining conviviality, learning, celebration, performance, and peer-to-peer network building in support for our respective engagements across the emergent movement for a wellbeing economy. We are activists, artists, researchers, students, community organisers, funders, carers and social entrepreneurs. Above all: we are citizens working and living in deep solidarity with the ‘more-than-human’, engaged with new forms of activism at the intersections of social, gender and ecological justice that combine deep care with emergent practices of transformation and regeneration. Our Community of Practice supports our aspiration to ‘think-with’ and ‘be-with’ – for we are relations before we are. ‘We relate therefore we are.’ We are part of a movement because we have shared, participated in, and shared stories that move us, comfort us in the face of failure, and call us into deep solidarity: ‘listening to collective unuttered wisdom, nurturing intrinsic, rather than productive value.’ (Dani D’Emilia and Daniel B Chávez, 2015)[1]

We have taken to heart the words of Professor Tim Jackson who observes that art pays homage to the nature of the journey. Its sense of struggle. The power (and partiality) of resolution: not as an instant, a comfortable future, but as a goal hard-earned, easily lost and almost always temporary. These are the lessons for the wellbeing economy. For all of us… Vision, Resolution, Consolation. These are the tools from which to build a different future. Our ability to live well, to flourish in less materialistic ways, is in essence an artistic endeavor.

Sustainability is the art of living well, within the ecological limits of a finite planet.

Art is more than an instrument in this project. It’s the very nature of it. 

Professor Tim Jackson, 2023, WEAll Ireland Webinar

Beings – human and the more-than-human – do not precede our relating (Donna Haraway). We are relational all the way down. In our Community of Practice we can do no other than ‘think with care’ for – through community – that is our practice: relationship and connection. With Maria Puig de la Bellacasa[2] we have come to know and experience that ‘relations of thinking and knowing require care and affect how we care.’ Joan Tronto[3] reminds us that care includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world…which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web.

(4) Commons by Design [Form and Content]:

Our Community of Practice will be convened & designed to support our anticipatory art of commoning. In this practice we seek to prefigure a keystone of the emergent wellbeing economy:

Our practice as commoners [verb., commoning].

In the words of our friend David Bollier (and the late Silke Helfrich)[4], the world of commoning represents a profound challenge to capitalism as a worldview because it is based on a very different way of ‘being in the world’ [ontology]. This is not widely appreciated because many people continue to view the commons through archaic perspectives – which is to say, through the lens of deep separation and radical individualism. In genuine commoning we learn to practice a new orientation to the world because its actions are based on a deep relationality with everything – the human and the ‘more-than- human’. ‘Actions are not simply matters of direct cause-and-effect between the most proximate, visible actors; they stem from a pulsating web of culture and myriad relationships through which new things emerge.’

Our Community of Practice will be cosmo-local: WEAll Ireland will focus on cultivating our Community of Practice on the island of Ireland, establishing intimate connections with communities and organisations – public and private - here on the island, while embracing and welcoming the participation and learning of our planetary peers who are already engaged in this work across and beyond the global WEAll network. Our selection of case studies (below) is a modest illustration of the deep wells of inspired activity already taking place across our networks of peers and across the world.

The commons are a pervasive, generative, and neglected social lifeform. They are complex, adaptive, living processes that generate wealth through which people address their shared needs with minimal reliance on markets or states. A commons arises as people engage in the social practices of commoning, participate in peer-to-peer governance, and develop collaborative forms of provisioning in the course of using a resource or care-wealth. While every commons is different, all ultimately depend on the physical gifts of nature and on sharing, collaboration, mutual respect and gentle reciprocity. (Bollier and Silfrich, 2019:74- 75)

(5) Language: 

Thanks to a long literary tradition of dissent and playfulness, often drawing attention to the essential instabilities of language and imposed narratives, we have ready access to traditions of critical thinking and practice. The insights of Machado de Oliveira on the interplay of language, modernity and coloniality – including attempts to fix particular meanings as ‘objective’ and ‘universal’ in the service of the powerful – are themes that have also been explored in modern Irish literature and theatre, not least in the work of Field Day and Brian Friel’s play Translations.

An early intuition that has informed the work of the WEAll Ireland hub is the importance of our experience of a diversity of languages on the island, and the particular history and experience of the Gaeltacht.

As Professor Peadar Kirby commented in his WEAll Ireland webinar, many people on the island are well aware of the experience of living between a dominant language and their indigenous linguistic and mytho-poetic traditions. ‘The experience of speaking a language that has been so actively and forcefully marginalized is that it takes us to very different imaginative spaces. So our daily experience is one of living ‘idir dhá chultúr’, we even write books about it. I suggest that as we become more and more aware that humanity itself is now living between two cultures, that of the dominant destructive paradigm and the new paradigm bubbling up in so many spaces and cracks, that our Irish experience of living ‘idir dhá chultúr’ takes on a very important significance.’

We are hopeful that our Community of Practice will continue to commit significant attention to this dimension of our island experience, which opens up a special solidarity with indigenous voices and communities across the world who are playing a significant role in disrupting our Western-authorized narratives and ways of knowing….Ways that are often implicated in histories of extractivism, colonialism, patriarchy and ecocide.

We embrace and look forward to further investigating the insight that formed one of the key conclusions at the ‘Exploring Language as a Resource for Sustainablity’ workshop organised by The Burren College of Art, Cloughjordan and Popal: ‘Earth-based Cosmology / Cosmeolaíocht Cré-bhunaithe: Irish inhabits an earth-based cosmology that puts humans in their proper place while respecting the feminine. Everything is connected in this inherently systemic understanding of the world. This inner knowing is where the treasure resides and it’s time to recognize and protect it. Language, tradition, music, biodiversity and the environment are all inextricably intertwined and share a common experience of loss.’[5]

Our thanks: We are indebted to the host of scholars, activists and thought-leaders who have given generously of their time during our series of online webinars and at our ‘deep dive’ events at The Playhouse in Derry/Londonderry and Cloughjordan Ecovillage. We offer a particular thanks to our guest speakers, including Katherine Trebeck, Kate Raworth, Professor Sandra Waddock, Boston College, Professor Tim Jackson, Centre for Understanding Sustainable Prosperity, University of Surrey, David Bollier, Schumacher Centre for New Economics, MA., Professor Peadar Kirby, Cloughjordan, Matthew Noone, Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Mel White, Cloughjordan, Dónal Ó’ Céilleachair, Anu Pictures, Eóin Ó Cuinneagáin, Cáit Ní Riain, Damian Gorman, Brian O’Doherty and the cast of ‘Beyond Belief’, the community members and staff at Cloughjordan Ecovillage and The Playhouse, and many more…We acknowledge the special inspiration and support of WEAll Global, including Marina Gattás and Kate Petrik.

1. From the Radical Tenderness Manifesto, 2015.

2. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, London: Minnesota Press.

3. Joan Tronto, 1987, ‘Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12, no.4: 644-63, cited in de la Casa, 2017.

4. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, 2019, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons, Canada: New Society Publishers

5. Chris Chapman and Martin Hawkes, 2023, Language as a Resource for Sustainability ‘Tá Dóchas