Presentation short abstract

Everyday degrowth refers to subtle daily practices and attitudes that reflect degrowth common senses. Drawing on Graeber’s everyday communism, it shows how these gestures, even in highly growth-oriented contexts, quietly challenge capitalist growth logics.

Presentation long abstract

Based on David Graeber’s distinction between “mythical” or ideal communism and “everyday” or empirical communism, we propose the concept of everyday degrowth to describe mundane, subtle, and often imperceptible practices, attitudes, or gestures that embody degrowth principles (that is, non-utilitarian activities that shrink the material scale of the economy while enhancing the collective quality of life).

Graeber reclaims the term communism to denote something beyond a political ideology: with “everyday communism,” he presents it as “a principle that exists and, to some extent, constitutes the necessary basis of any society or human relationship of any kind” (Graeber, 2010, p. 3), arguing that many routine interactions inherently operate according to this principle.

The framework of everyday degrowth helps identify shared meanings and habitual practices that arise in everyday life and that, alongside their communalist dimension, reflect core degrowth values such as autonomy, self-imposed limits, and care for all forms of life, even in unexpected or strongly growth-oriented contexts. Although their full political potential may not be realized within these environments, their very presence subtly disrupts the dominance of capitalist growth logics and challenges the ubiquity of growth common senses.

Presentation short abstract

The socialization of Berlin's housing sector offers a path to urban degrowth: By transferring flats into collective ownership and democratic administration, the initiative challenges financialized urbanism and aims for an environmental just, decommodified life that would enable everyday degrowth.

Presentation long abstract

Berlin’s housing crisis is deeply political-ecological: Buildings account for 40% of EU energy consumption and 36% of emissions, while financialized ownership structures prioritize profit extraction over environmental or social needs.

Against this backdrop, the Berlin socialization initiatives “Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen and Co” propose a fundamental shift: By transferring a quarter Million of apartments from major real estate companies and speculative markets into collective ownership, the initiative aims to establish management structures that emphasizes democratic participation from tenants and the broader urban society while adhering to principles of degrowth and environmental justice. Accordingly, the initiative not only proposes the socialization of major real estate companies as a decisive response to Berlin's acute housing crisis but also illustrates how socialization can serve as a vehicle for a radical socio-ecological transformation.

This presentation explores the political-environmental and degrowth potential of socialization (Vergesellschaftung) in Berlin’s housing sector. Building on Erik Olin Wright’s framework of real Utopias, and David Graeber’s concept of everyday communism, I argue that the democratization processes envisioned in Berlin’s socialization movement would enable (new) forms of low-carbon, cooperative, and decommodified everyday life that directly confront the ecological and social harms of financialized urban housing.

This paper argues that democratization-through-socialization already prefigures degrowth in the present. By confronting capitalist urbanism at the scale of ownership and governance, Vergesellschaftung opens a pathway in which everyday degrowth emerges from tenants’ (and the Berliners’) expanded capacity to co-decide, maintain, and collectively shape the material reproduction of their homes.

Presentation short abstract

The paper traces to what extent mundane, localised food perceptions and practices in rural Romania can reflect changing macropolitical structures such as socialist and capitalist forms of governance over time, proposing them as sites of political knowledge and sources of everyday degrowth.

Presentation long abstract

This paper traces to what extent mundane, localised food perceptions and practices in rural Romania can reflect changing macropolitical structures like socialist and capitalist governance over time. The socialist lived experiences and personal memories are rich, overlooked sources of embodied knowledge that could inform a democratic, socially and ecologically just postcapitalist transition. Socialism shaped rural food practices and rituals, while the postcommunist transition erased communal cultural discourse, social networks and alternative economies.

The research asks to what extent food and local rural identities are linked to socialist practices. It aims to resurface untold stories of collectivity and material culture in socialist Romania. Food practices could contribute to autonomy, solidarity and social networks, defying an oppressive political regime.

The methodology centers collaborative cooking and eating, grounding foodmaking and relationality as sites of political knowledge and identity. The research practice is informed by Brady’s (2011) “cooking-as-inquiry” method. This involves cooking interviews with 8 participants aged 59-93 from four subregions in Transylvania, conducted in their kitchens. Personal reflexive observation and action research complement the inquiry.

The paper frames the research findings around three storylines of everyday degrowth: spatial shifts through communal plum-jam making in various village locations, less-compressed perceptions of time through pickling, and ritualistic processes baking bread and making soup. Socialist rural food culture highlights to what extent food practices were spatialised and anchored in reciprocity, seasonal recipes, localised resources and tastes, functioning independently from externally-imposed macrostructures. The acquired results propose lived experiences and food practices as political sources of everyday degrowth.

Presentation short abstract

Urban gardening is a practice already acknowledged to support degrowth. In my paper I explore how selected gardens in the city of Turin practice everyday degrowth, intentionally or not, and how their practices can be construed as postfigurative.

Presentation long abstract

The research proposes to understand the role of selected urban gardens in the city of Turin in supporting degrowth, intentionally or not. As the city has a long tradition of urban gardening, I propose that this could be understood as a postfigurative practice (Muñoz-Sueiro and Kallis, 2024). Beyond exploring this category through urban gardening, I look at how the gardens align with degrowth values, and with the principles of sharing, reuse, and sufficiency (Krähmer & Cristiano, 2022) which support the right to the ecological city (Krähmer, 2024). I propose that beyond actually enacting degrowth through their activities, the urban gardens also support it through incremental changes in habitus in the areas they are active, through active citizenship, community building, and educational activities for citizens of all ages. Due to high variety in garden typologies, from types of administration, to types of cultivation, there is also variation in the way each garden embodies or not these principles, and how they might contribute or not to degrowth through their practices. In a city deemed as one of the most polluted in Italy, degrowth and ecology become highly relevant, as do the policies and practices supporting them.

The research is part of a masters’ degree and is ongoing.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the everyday practices through which knowledge is generated, disseminated and embraced within PIFcamp and DiNaCon — so-called 'hackers' camps' where technology and art converge in natural environments.

Presentation long abstract

Hackers' ethics encompasses a variety of practices, including the sharing of information, data and knowledge. The existence of temporary spaces that facilitate the exchange of these elements has been shown to lay the foundations for collaboration. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at the PIFcamp (an annual hacker camp held in the Soča Valley, Slovenia) and the Digital Naturalism Conference (held in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Bali), I focus on activities that can be categorised as 'commons', where concepts and ideas are practised and adopted across disciplines and domains. Field workshops inspired participants to incorporate local practices, such as plant foraging, into their artistic creations, as well as engaging in fermentation experiments. A recurring theme was the formation of ad hoc research collectives tasked with identifying indigenous edible flora in the environment. This subsequently prompted a more in-depth examination of the role of food practices in and for society, exploring and comparing everyday practices that can be categorised under the degrowth umbrella.

I explore conceptual proposals inspired by community collaborations (Knox, 2021; Kera, 2012), rethinking urban metabolism (Zhang, 2020), approaches to thinking about food (Mann et al., 2011; Mann & Mol, 2019; Mol, 2021) and the commons (Curto-Millet & Corsín Jiménez, 2022; Corsín Jiménez & Curto-Millet, 2023; Murillo, 2025), and ask what insights can we gain from foraging and fermenting hacker communities when it comes to imagining and proposing practices for potential collective futures? Can foraging inspire us to consider social, political, and economic imaginaries in terms of regrowth, undergrowth, and overgrowth?

Presentation short abstract

Degrowth has been described as based on a notion of radical abundance. This paper presents a research agenda to study non-capitalist notions of abundance from an anthropological and ethnographic perspective, with the expectation to learn how to expand these spaces and bring about a degrowth society.

Presentation long abstract

This paper contributes to the study of everyday degrowth by proposing an anthropological research agenda focused on abundance, positing the hypothesis that everyday degrowth is fundamentally based in non-capitalist notions of abundance, which has been described as radical abundance. In our current system, hegemonic growth ideology sustains itself through the political fabrication of scarcity, using the formula of unlimited needs combined with limited means to perpetuate chronic scarcity and restrict experiential freedom.

In contrast, this paper challenges the universality of the scarcity idea, drawing on critical anthropological and philosophical precedents (such as the work of Marshal Sahlins and Georges Bataille's dépense) to pivot attention toward its opposite concept: abundance. Specifically, this work sets the conceptual grounds for a comparative anthropological study to understand different notions of non-capitalist abundance from an ethnographic perspective.

Expanding on my doctoral work, I explore how indigenous modes of living articulate cosmological principles of plenitude that inherently oppose the logic of scarcity. Key examples include the Mapuche-Huilliche principle of itrofil mongen ("all life without exception") and practices of joyful mutual aid in southern Chile, such as the minga. These perspectives offer powerful counter-narratives to dominant ecomodernist visions of capitalist abundance, which rely on reinforcing a logic of unbounded productivity and scaling potentiality.

Ultimately, this research seeks to analyze how these non-capitalist understandings of abundance, often hidden in plain sight, interact with pervasive capitalist notions and, crucially, how they can be harnessed in our effort to bring about a degrowth future.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores alternatives to development as everyday degrowth in Imbabura region of Northern Ecuador. We explore how local communities in conjunction with local social organization and municipality resist mining by creating alternatives that are based on Sumak Kawsay/Buen Vivir.

Presentation long abstract

Exploring alternatives to development stemming from resisting extractivism in Imbabura region of Northern Ecuador, this contribution explores the various everyday degrowth in the context of pluriverse. Building on Walter Mignolo’s decolonial dynamics of resistance and re-existence, this paper explores how indigenous communities with municipality alliance create not only resistance to neocolonial extractivism, but also projects aiming of re-existenance.

Ecuador became world known in 2008 after adopting a plurinational constitution in the age of the socialist Correa government. At the time it became the first nation to recognize the rights of nature, plurinationality as well as to officially adopt alternatives to development approach in economic development. Social development was blooming at the time due to large scale infrastructural investments. Halfway of the millennium, the oil prices plummeted and extractivist economic activities intensified. One of the regions which this is exemplified is the municipality of Cotacachi in Imbabura.

As a response, local indigenous communities, a local umbrella organization of indigenous and peasant communities UNORCAC, and the municipality of Cotacachi started to carry out alternative development projects, based on small-scale hydroenergy production, agroecology, communitarian tourism and handcrafts. These initiatives aimed not only to stop negative impacts of mining to the communities, but to create ways to enhance self-sufficiency and autonomy of these communities to preserve their ways of life.

This study is based on series of interviews conducted in Ecuador in November 2025, after the recent aftermath of the popular uprising in Imbabura.

Presentation short abstract

Post-growth futures must centre care. This paper analyses a Chinese elder-care charity. In 2011 a Buddhist monk set up a free vegetarian canteen, today there are 900 and a non-profit care home. This organisation practices degrowth-like solutions to problems inherent in growth based ageing societies.

Presentation long abstract

Care work is central to 'the ecological question'. Post-growth futures can be described as ‘always and everywhere…about care…economy as care’ (Jackson, 2025). Using theoretical insights such as reclaiming the commons for degrowth communism (Saito, 2024), frugal/radical abundance (Hickle, 2019; Plomteux, 2024) and ‘postfiguring’ (Munoz-Sueiro & Kallis, 2024), I interrogate a Chinese elder-care charity. Set up in 2011 and founded by a Buddhist monk, the organisation began a free vegetarian lunch establishment mainly catering for the elderly. Without centralised control the idea grew spontaneously with around 900 branches today. Linking traditional philosophical theory, including ecological narratives, with a critique of capitalist logic and modernity, this organisation is creating practical solutions to problems inherent in growth based ageing societies. Using Saito’s (2024) argument that sites of production are more important than sites of consumption to undermine capitalist logic I argue, through textual analysis and participant observation, that this organisation can be seen as an example of ‘actually existing degrowth’ as it is producing something ‘radical’ in a capitalist system – elder care that escapes the capitalist profit motive and does not fully rely on the state or the nuclear family. This is further exemplified by the organisation setting up a non-profit, volunteer organised, pay-as-you-can elderly care home in 2019 next to their Buddhist temple. The paper will ask whether this organisation should be seen as ‘postfiguring’ or prefiguring China’s inevitable march into a post-growth future by critically engaging with the idea of ‘postfiguring’.

Presentation short abstract

This paper reflects on the more-than-human aspects of the concept of everyday degrowth. Drawing on ethnographic and environmental change research in Sumatra, I show how agroecological relations contribute to seed and food sovereignty, land struggles, and Land Back in ways relevant for degrowth.

Presentation long abstract

This paper reflects on the more-than-human and other-than-human aspects of the concept of everyday degrowth, which posits that there exists a latent political potential in mundane, cooperative, and ecologically attune ways of living. Drawing on ethnographies of smallholder and landless peoples’ agroecological practices in Sumatra, I show that everyday forms of agroecology contribute to vital political horizons of seed and food sovereignty, land struggles and Land Back in ways relevant for theories and practices of movements for land and degrowth.

I present three “ethnographic encounters” in Sumatra to substantiate my argument. Ethnographic encounters are a method to bring together the ethnographer and the interlocutor across difference that can denaturalize dominant colonial Western political economic categories and bring forward the heterogeneity of lived experiences. In the first ecnounter, I retell the practices of an enthusiastic seed sharer, and the lived meanings of this persons seed practices. In the second, I retell the practice of tending to a tree-sapling homegarden nursery as an act of care to sustain food forest lifeways. The third is a retelling of a famous Javanese political-movement poem, about the meanings of grass-life as compared to the material qualities of plastic-life.

Taken together, these specific encounters with what are widespread practices of seed sharing, tree tending, and literary representations of plants show how common, everyday experiences contribute values of mutual and ecological care.