The Blue Satin Bowerbird and the Joy of Flying the NEST
A talk for the NEST (Narratives for Ecological and Sustainable Transition(s) Lecture Series University of Bergamo 8.7.24
Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of the NEST Research Network lecture series. It is a real honour to be amongst such respected and esteemed company and to be the first - I’m feeling the pressure! I hope what I have prepared for you today does you proud.
I would like to introduce you to my companions today. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza came into my life at Professor Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Summer School in Utrecht, which is also where I met Stefano Rozzoni. As a working-class woman from the industrial heartlands in the North of England, philosophy of any kind was not part of my education until I first went to Utrecht with my good friend Kay Sidebottom, nearly ten years ago now. And I imagine that Spinoza’s thinking did not form part of the philosophical curricula of the British public school and elite university system which, until very recently, formed the educational backbone of most of the UK government. Spinoza was neglected and despised in his own time, and largely forgotten since, until he was brought into the consciousness of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze - someone else I hadn’t heard of - in the late 20th century and from there into Braidotti’s critical posthumanism.
Because of this, the English speaking world only had one concept of power, one of hierarchy and inequality, the power-as-usual which has driven our politics. Writing in Latin, Spinoza called this potestas. And he also wrote about a very different concept of power: potentia.
If I had to describe my work in one word that would be it: potentia. I am a changemaker and I work with changemakers in UK vocational and adult community education. I teach them how to recognise their own potentia and that of the people around them and those whom they serve.
Potentia power is not about hierarchies, not about role, rank and ego. It’s about joyful changemaking. It’s in the desire that all humans - and non-humans - have, to live, to survive and to thrive. It is our inherent power, not a power imposed (or taken away) by the external forces of potestas. Nature has potentia in abundance, poppies in the mud of the trenches, the Little Prince’s rose in the desert, the flora finding places to grow in the bombed-out town. It’s the deer roaming our streets during lockdown and the way that nature finds a way of rewilding itself when the humans have moved out. Nature expresses itself…naturally (where it can). But human beings, constrained by the chains of potestas, often don’t recognise potentia in ourselves. We often feel we have no agency to do more than conform. Once we can begin to recognise our own potentia in the context of our own ethics, we step into our power for good. Potentia therefore becomes our capacity to act affirmatively on the world.
And it is an affirmative power. The force which drives potentia is joy. Spinoza viewed joy as being fundamentally linked to potentia and he saw joy not as a fleeting happiness - a happiness which, in our society now is commodified into handbags and holidays (not that I mind holidays!) - but as something deeper, something which is forged in how difficult life is. Through our potentia, guided by our ethics, we transform the sorrows, anger, disappointment and frustration of life into doing something good.
For Spinoza, all of this is something to do with God. That was his frame. The favour Deleuze did us was to secularise Spinoza, so that we can all find our place in his thinking. Later, feminist philosophers such as Braidotti presented Spinoza’s thinking as including an essential life force - they called it zoë - driving the experience of joy. Once feelings and emotions are sparked into by connection with zoë, then that joy is channelled into acts of potentia. And we have come to recognise through the work of Erin Manning, Sarah Amsler, Karen Walrond and others that small, persistent, consistent acts of potentia-through-joy can change things around us and ultimately we hope it will change the world. Although it doesn’t come directly from Spinoza, having a grasp of zoë is important, because this life-force is not the sole preserve of humans. Here is where the natural world gets written back in.
I’m telling you this because I’ll be talking a lot about potentia in the next half an hour or so and because it encapsulates my approach to philosophy. What matters is not what was written four hundred years ago, but what we do with it now. Throughout my learning, still today and hopefully forever, the source is an inspiration, not a directive.
I would like you to imagine how different the world might be, had everyone had access to an understanding of power as both potestas and potentia for the last few centuries?
Of course we didn’t, not just because Spinoza’s work - going against the grain of his times - was effectively suppressed, but because people stopped reading Latin. But we have it now. And in my work, I find that potentia as a concept is something that people quickly grasp. It’s not esoteric, just because it’s Latin. And maybe because it hasn’t featured on the curricula of those elite educational institutions, it isn’t caught up in academia. It’s available to us all.
I won’t lie to you. The first time I went to Braidotti’s Summer School, I understood about one word in ten - and the lectures were in English! It took five years of wrestling with these and other broadly posthuman concepts before I wrote up my PhD. I was still learning when I submitted corrections after my viva defence. And I have continued to learn, as I’ve taken the concepts out into the world. I now teach the skills of potentia to Green Changemakers, people working in education who are trying to change the systems around them, for a more just world.
It helps because I work as a nomad. Although I still do some work in the academic space, I am not attached to any single organisation, I do not have to obey curricula written by others and I am not slowed down (or not much) by hierarchies, gatekeepers, organisational politics. But I do not work alone.
I’m a freelancer and I have travelling companions. Some are human, the people with whom I form shifting constellations, a term coined by posthuman curator Maria Hlavajova, whom I also encountered in Utrecht. Constellations are not fixed teams, we don’t work for the same organisation or for any organisation, our work is time-limited as we create spaces to work together which are later colonised by potestas, incorporated into strategies and organisational practice - Deleuze’s ‘reterritorialisation’ and ‘territorialisation’. And that’s necessary, we are not anarchists although our work may sometimes be perceived as anarchic by people who are invested in potestas. We are working within capitalism, ducking and weaving amongst its hierarchies, needing potestas to open doors, sometimes dismantling spaces so we can smooth out systems to more effectively advance the work. Our borders are always open, we resist certainty and replication, we stay on the move. Braidotti teaches us that a ‘good career’ in the current systems is one-third potentia and two-thirds potestas. The ratio of a nomadic career is reversed - one-third potestas to get through the doors in the first place, two-thirds potentia to bring changemaking energy into the space.
Some of my fellow travellers are non-human, like the Blue Satin Bowerbird here. In physical life, he lives in south east Australia, where he hops around the forest floor. When mating season comes around, he builds a beautiful bower - not to live in, just for show and to attract a mate. He decorates it with blue shiny things - often the detritus of human life, such as bottle tops and straws, maybe blue petals from a garden, anecdotally the occasional sapphire. The females come along and they choose a mate. The bower - which is hopeless as a nest - gets kicked over and the blue shiny things scattered. Until next time, where they are repurposed and re-curated. I love the fact that the younger female birds choose the most beautifully constructed bowers, whereas the older females are attracted to the best dancers. Surely that should be a metaphor for life!
The Bowerbird is useful to my work because the education system in the UK is so locked down. Braidotti has said often that the first thing fascists seize is the curriculum and we can see this playing out all around us. Day-to-day, educators battle with their potentia desire to do social purpose work - to create flourishing and self-aware citizens for the long now - yet their time is strangled by bureaucracy. The blue shiny things of their practice - of which there are many, because potentia educators have learned to be subversive - are ignored and dismissed by the systems of accountability, they end up discarded on the metaphorical classroom floor. The Bowerbird teaches us to protect and curate them, and through our rhizomatic constellations, spreading like bluebells across spaces of communication, we inspire and encourage one another.
But somehow he is more than a metaphor, because I don’t just steal the Bowerbird’s story to illustrate a point, his presence inspires me and informs my ethics. As he seeks out the blue shiny things, I also seek out opportunities to embody my ethics, or the ethics of the work, in the face of externally imposed ethical frameworks, which in a potestas society we are paid to obey.
This makes the Bowerbird a figuration, another Braidotti term; being more than a metaphor and less than a physically influential agent, he yet still has agency through the work. I see him in photographs from events on LinkedIn, brought into the picture by people I’ve never met, who meet other people through constellations which spread out like benign weeds.
The NEST Research Network is an acronym: Narratives for Ecological and Sustainable Transitions. It is also a generative tool to explore new ideas. The verb ‘nest’ means to create a sheltered space and through my work I aim to do this - create spaces and virtual architectures for educators and others to regenerate their potentia in community and to share ideas and experiences. I love that the NEST website refers to the Greek word ‘oikos’, which means common home - our Earth, populated as it is by humans and non-humans, everything which has potentia. Rejecting the deficit implication of ‘non-human’, posthuman thinker Kay Sidebottom asks, what can we learn from ‘more-than-human’ teachers. Our recent publication, [Birdsong] summarises a weekend we spent with other educators in the Yorkshire Dales, in which we sought to learn about our own practice by connecting with nature. The NEST Research Network is also interested in transdisciplinary practice, using the metaphor of nesting to ‘place or embed one thing within another to assess relationality and complexity’, as the NEST website describes it. Potestas gets in the way of this, because it suits ‘power-as-usual’ to split things off into little boxes - atomisation - for command and control. Today, I am extending the metaphor to explore how I and the Bowerbird have found joy in flying the nest.
I worked for the same organisation for a long time. It’s where I met Kay Sidebottom, whose work is so entangled with my own and with whom I studied at Braidotti’s Summer School in Utrecht for those five summers. Our workplace was a community college for adults, situated in a former stately home. That word ‘former’ is interesting. Political and socio-economic conditions had changed with the dismantling of industry in the area, but memory lingers. As I came to realise I would have to leave there after twenty years to do the work I needed to do, I began to see the hauntology of the place; the ghost potestas that remained in place, dictating its structures, processes and culture. My PhD went through many changes during this time and emerged as a piece of work where I tried to make these visible systems invisible, in order to imagine an unimagined future. And I had to move myself - and my research - away from the workplace and into a nomadic space in order to do this.
There are other narratives at play, of course, but this is the line of flight I chose to follow.
I’ve never spoken publicly about leaving there before, but I want to share some memories with you today, about the changes I experienced there, over twenty years. Imagine the house, and the gardens. When I first went there to work, at the turn of the millennium, the gardens - originally formal - were wild and ‘uncared for’ (a statement which only makes sense if we assume that to care for nature means to tidy it up into what humans perceive as beautiful). We were free to wander in the grounds and we took full advantage of this, teaching by wandering, doing early ‘more-than-human’ work as we glimpsed foxes and investigated ferns. Not intentionally posthuman - we hadn’t encountered posthuman thinking then - more an instinctive connection with nature on our doorstep. Over two decades, the gardens were re-formalised, which involved the destruction of trees, “to enable healthy growth”. Funding was sought and managed by a partnership of organisations, who - slowly and inexorably - closed down our access bit by bit. We needed a code for the gate, we could only go in at certain times (so that we didn’t get in the way of paying visitors), we had to stick to the paths.
At the same time, the appalling history of the house began to emerge. Long before it was a place of education, the family fortunes were built on the transatlantic slave trade. Black bodies were worked to death in order to build that stately home. That history had always been there, of course, in plain sight, overlaid with the college’s establishment as part of the trade union and labour movement of the 1970s, which, whatever its intentions, replicated the hierarchies - the potestas - of the system it was fighting. Nothing exemplified this more than the ‘Blackamoor Statue’. I apologise for using that term, but it was the description openly used for the statue of an enslaved Black boy, which was discovered during a renovation of the house and placed on display. As far as I know, because I haven’t been back, it is still there.
Once I saw the impact of historical potestas I couldn’t unsee it, and of course I couldn’t stop talking about it. Posthuman thinking teaches us to see what’s unseen, to follow the lines of potestas, inequality, money. This organisation, which existed for a social purpose, to educate adults previously failed by the education system to become critically thinking humans, was structured in such a way that the work there became too difficult for me to do.
I want to be clear that I am not blaming individual humans. That social purpose organisation still continues to do its work. I am sure that people still thrive there and feel the gratitude that I felt for many years, that they get to work and study in such beautiful surroundings. But I couldn’t see the beauty any more. I flew the nest.
It took me a long time to grieve. I had really believed that I would be there forever. Some years previously, a wise manager had said to me, “Don’t put your trust in organisations.” And yet I did. I had to grieve for a long time. What got me through was becoming a posthuman thinker and encountering Spinoza’s joy. Finally, I began to channel my grief and all its associated emotions into joyful practice, as I recognised my own potentia. I stepped into a different kind of power and over the past eight years, with the Bowerbird by my side, I have attempted a different kind of work.
During this time, the Bowerbird moved from being an analytic device - sifting through the blue shiny things of my own research - to a figuration keeping me close to my ethics and finally to a companion species. He literally goes on the road with me now, in the form of this little gift. I was doing the sort of work that nobody would pay for at the time, connecting people up, creating spaces for potentia. I didn’t have a theory of change to work with, didn’t even call myself a changemaker at that time, I was feeling my way.
I had to earn money, so I worked on national professional development programmes, becoming increasingly influential in their design, using publicly available social media to connect educators up. These were ‘quality improvement programmes’, but the Bowerbird encouraged educators to collect and curate the blue shiny things that did not form part of formal quality improvement accountability, to explore a ‘values-line’ of practice, which ran alongside the KPIs, or key performance indicators, they had to meet. Very recently, a piece of systems thinking research I’ve been involved in as part of a think tank laid bare this social purpose/compliance purpose dichotomy at the heart of further education in England. As my own research made the visible, invisible in order to think further, this is the invisible laid inescapably visible. It cannot be unseen.
When lockdown hit, the work stopped and this is the moment when me and the Bowerbird really took flight. COVID was horrific, no denying that, but it created space for the work that nobody would pay for. I co-founded the joyful collective movement #JoyFE, a hashtag community which channelled Spinoza’s joy into practice. A few months previously, I’d done a TEDx Talk on ‘The Ethics of Joy’ and the buzz around this helped me be bold in putting joy front and centre. #JoyFE has no membership, no bank account, no organising committee. Volunteer energy ebbs and flows, as potentia ebbs and flows. We don’t count numbers. It’s never been about how many people listen to a broadcast or come along to an event. It’s about the spread of ideas, which is, incidentally, the tagline of TED Talks.
Joy began to infuse post-16 education - not everywhere, of course, but like the rhizomatic bluebells it found a foothold in places open to new ideas; those ideas spreading through #JoyFE networks on publicly available social media. As life opened up, the ‘quality improvement’ work continued, became braver and less apologetic about its philosophical genealogy. Other figurations emerged - the Dancing Princesses overturning the notion of vocational education as the UK’s ‘Cinderella Service’, potentia people as golden unicorns. And, emboldened by the deer on our streets during lockdown, the rewilding movement and - of course - the increasing velocity of the climate emergency, nature began to find a way in.
Just under a year ago, the Green Changemakers programme began. This is the work of my lifetime, an opportunity to bring together all this thinking and experience. It is a devolution project in the West Midlands of England, funded by the Government (potestas), which is training people from vocational education organisations to be Green Changemakers. What’s new about this is that we teach the skills of potentia - of changemaking. This is a pivot from the original intention, which was to teach ‘green skills’ to educators. We quickly realised that we can’t do that generically - vocational education is specialist, what do I know about engineering or social care or graphic design? We cannot continue to infantilise teachers. We have to trust them, as subject experts. And we have to help them recognise their own potentia and shift the cultures, systems and mindsets in organisations that get in the way of this. We made three pivots:
The first pivot was that shift from teaching ‘Green Skills’ to teaching changemaker skills. The skills, knowledges and behaviours to move organisations from good intentions to long-term sustainable change.
The second pivot was shifting from planning to energy. This is a hard one to articulate, but a standard ‘leadership’ programme (shall we say) would get people identifying an ‘improvement project’ on day one, teach participants some generic stuff and then mentor them to produce a report based on the intervention, which would ultimately sit on a website somewhere. How can we know what we need the outcome to be, when none of us have ever faced these challenges before? We could see the limitations of this approach. We frontloaded the skills development activities and created space for co-creation; changemakers co-designing the programme as we went along.
The third pivot was shifting from the individual to community. We quickly brought Changemakers together in a WhatsApp group, to strengthen the community. We worked collectively in Google Docs. This agile working enabled us design and host a Green Skills Conference for nearly 100 people in three weeks. This WhatsApp community keeps the potentia alive.
Many of the Green Changemakers are also green activists, outside of work. In this protected space, this care-full space, where ethics are embodied, they can bring their life and work, their green purpose, into a healing encounter. The programme is growing, the Green Changemakers are changing their organisations in consistent, persistent, slow and subtle ways and our next challenge is to break the stranglehold on vocational education of a certain attitude towards impact. ‘Impact’ is a stick to beat us with. We have to say what the impact will be of an idea or initiative before we’ve even started, and the moment we finish, before we even have time to take a breath, we have to say what the impact will be. This keeps education locked into short-term thinking, so we have begun to work with a new figuration - the concept of the ‘long now’, mindful of the past and working now for the future. We are meeting soon - those of us with potentia energy to do this work - to begin to develop metrics along the values line.
It’s a new model of curriculum, based on three framings:
1 AimHi Earth’s 15 Green Skills
There are other framings for Green Skills work. It doesn’t matter which organisations choose to drive the work forward. We chose the 15 Green Skills because they are expansive. The work of changemaking is to influence the people - and ultimately the systems and strategy - around you, so the job of Green Changemakers is to convince everyone (and themselves) that they embody some aspect of green skills already, whether that’s around technical, nature, systems or people thinking. Knowing that you already have the skills to serve and protect our planet is empowering. This research by AimHi Earth is transdisciplinary and it embodies the wisdom of people at the very sharp end of the climate emergency, such as the indigenous concept of ‘Seventh Generation Thinking’ (which is how we conceptualise ‘The Long Now’).
2 The Thinking Environment
The second framing is the Thinking Environment, a set of processes that enable us to think more independently, and think better together. The energy of potentia brings an incredible momentum, when we are an ‘Adventure Ready Squad’ working on changemaking initiatives together (this is a Green Skill). But we can’t ride that wave of energy without taking time to pause. Building Thinking Environments into our systems releases potentia, and it also compels us to take pause. When we pause, we notice more and we reach deeper into our thinking. We get beyond assumptions and move together into new ideas.
And pause is part of rest. We are deeply influenced by the Radical Rest work of The Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey, who connects our right to rest with the fatal histories of her enslaved ancestors who were worked to death. Of all the lightbulb moments on my nomadic journey, this has been the most life-changing. Rest as resistance, and as a self-responsibility. Not easy in fast-paced, potestas-driven systems. But we have to make it possible.
3 Four Seasons of Changemaking
We finally have a co-created theory of change.
The Four Seasons implement those concepts of potentia and pause which are so essential to keep momentum for The Long Now, to prevent things fizzling out. We begin by getting unstuck, taking a clear look at where we’re at, identifying the values in our practice, the things we have to do and the things we do for the sake of it. We move into releasing potentia throughout the organisation. Changemakers figure out their patterns of influence and use this to wake up the potentia in others, leaning on the clout of potestas where they need it.
The third season is gaining clarity and this is the work that Green Changemakers have to influence their organisations to do, with the ongoing support of the changemaker community. Together, they will co-created hitherto unimagined futures for FE. We can’t know what this will be, until we clear a path to collectively imagine it.
We’re attempting a paradigm shift. Whether we make it or not, we will still have done good work.
This has been hard to write, because I have vulnerably returned to a time of my life which was painful and also formative of my nomadic journey. And it has led to further self-revelation, if you’ll allow me to take a personal moment. I was in a coaching session recently where I made the connection between my choice of a nomadic career and my lived experience as an adopted person, finding my way towards healthy attachment. Last week, when I was running a Radical Rest room at a college I work with often, a colleague there said to me, “How lovely it is, that you work as a nomad, but you have all these places where you belong.” The Bowerbird in my heart gave a deep sigh of knowing. I’ve flown the nest, but this is a different way of coming home.
As posthumanism teaches us, as The NEST Research Network knows, we are all interconnected, human and ‘more-than-human’. I never set out to be any sort of environmental expert and my knowledge, compared with that of the Green Changemakers, is pitiful. But my work is potentia and whilst I cannot teach people to have that joyful energy, I love that my work is in creating spaces for them to find that in themselves.
Thank you for listening to me today.
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