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Short abstract:

Collaborative workshops will involve four groups, each comprising a maximum of seven persons, making a total of 28 participants.

Abstract:

Post-Growth Control Wars (PGCW) is an ethnographic futures living lab and a collaborative action-research method that integrates strategic, systems, and transition design, play, generative conflict, and performance. It conceptualizes individuals and groups as key holders and catalysts of socio-technical imaginaries. Consequently, it aims to achieve several objectives.The primary goal is to create conditions conducive to observing how contested visions of the future and controversies surrounding degrowth and sustainability converge, colliding and co-evolving together in the realms of industry, governance, technology, and the economy.Additionally, PGCW aims to stimulate social (and scholarly) imagination by simulating sociotechnical scenarios framed by planetary boundaries. It seeks to challenge modern optimism rooted in the myth that techno-scientific progress can solve all challenges, including the futures it produces. PGCW also strives to decolonize imaginaries captured by technocapitalist logics and to rehearse socio-technical transition strategies towards a post-growth society.PGCW represents the latest iteration of "Control Wars," a method previously focused on automated technologies, technological sovereignty, data commons (including an adaptation for primary schools), climate change, and the potential consequences of Covid-19. Since 2018, it has been implemented in academic, activist, artistic, and design contexts in various cities, including Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, New York, Eindhoven, Porto, Mexico City, Amsterdam, and Bilbao.Specifically, PGCW has been conducted on three occasions, serving to build an archive of the post-growth imagination, create stories about post-growth transitions, identify commonplaces within the post-growth imagination, develop a catalog of possible transitional tactics, and re-enchant the discourse and potential practices around degrowth.