What if we lived with and for one another?
Imagining health justice in a new economy, a podcast
This podcast is part of the Reimagining Economics Possibilities series. This series accompanies the Neighbourhood Doughnut portfolio of work in which CIVIC SQUARE, along with many neighbours, researchers, partners and visionaries have, since 2019, been exploring large and small scale ways to reimagine economic possibilities.
The series brings together 15 commissioned works by visionaries who are reimagining economic possibility from a number of different angles. We are deeply passionate about Doughnut Economics and recognise the wealth of possibilities it unlocks, as well as its limitations. As Kate Raworth has said, quoting British statistician George E. P. Box, “all frameworks are wrong, but some are useful.” Therefore, we want to be able to stretch as far and wide as the Doughnut Economics Action Lab invites us to, seeing it as a platform to organise, whilst also encompassing a plurality of bold visions.
In this audio contribution to the series KAVIAN KULASABANATHAN and SARAH LASOYE dream together about what a vision of what a liberated world look like to them. Weaving in quotes from visionary abolitionist thinkers and poets, they venture into a future where economies are relational, health is collective and care is abundant.
Kavian Kulasabanathan is an Eela-Tamil clinician, with a focus on state violence as a determinant of poor health, community-led models of care and uses of the collective imagination in visioning for abolitionist futures. Sarah is a poet, prison abolitionist, health justice campaigner at Medact.
TRANSCRIPT
“We do this work of dreaming alternative liberated abolitionist futures in community with so many others, past and present.”
Kavian Kulasabanathan 0:00
This is a conversation between Sarah and me, in response to a provocation of how a new economy intersects with our practice and thinking around health justice. Shout out to CIVIC SQUARE for holding these spaces for us to imagine.
We’ll journey through setting the scene for how our current economic system makes us sick by design, before trying to reset the frame for a new economic paradigm. And finally, having a go at filling that with what is possible. We do this work of dreaming alternative liberated abolitionist futures in community with so many others, past and present. And so have woven in voices of and readings by people we love and admire. We want to acknowledge that we’ve come to the space building on the thinking and practice of so many incredible kin, who share details about to go with this conversation. We hope this conversation builds on some curiosities and questions and complements your work.
Sarah Lasoye 0:51
How would you describe yourself and your practice?
Kavian Kulasabanathan 0:57
My name is Kavian. I guess I’m a clinician by training, but mainly interested in state and structural violence as determinants of poor health. That’s police, prisons and the immigration service, but actually also state structures that are meant to look after us; education system, social care, and health care. Ultimately, I’m really wanting to facilitate a discussion around the community visioning for what alternatives might look like.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Farzana Khan really speak to this idea of temporal justice and the fact that part of the function of the capitalist project is that it steals time away from us. It extracts labor, but it also extracts good years of our lives.
Sarah Lasoye 1:33
I’m Sarah, and I am an abolitionist. I am a Health Justice campaigner, and a poet as well, I think my practice is trying to carry out lots of different actions, lots of different bits of work, like education for myself and other people in service towards a world without policing, without prisons, a world that is no one no longer like under the thumb of capitalism, and doing that in big and small ways.
Kavian Kulasabanathan 2:08
How is the economy as it is now, bad for our health?
Sarah Lasoye 2:13
I was going to start by saying that the economy and capital E economic policy, for a long time I thought that this was the realm of people who are interested in finance and like big business, and it was almost antithetical to laboratory work to be super engaged in what the economy is. Not necessarily economics, but the economy. And so I feel that only recently have I come to understand why grappling with a political economy of health is the foundation to then thinking about like, “Okay, well, what is this in service of, and what way of life exists in service of, what values exist in service of and I think, yeah, just being rooted, as I am now in an anti-capitalist commitment as it necessitates you to really engage with both capital E economics and what it means on a on a smaller scale, on a community level, in practice, in that new world that we’re working towards. As well, when we talk about the economic system, we should also speak about how it informs our conceptualisation of health as a very, in a very individualistic way. In a way that means it’s easier to to mark someone as you know, deserving of care or deserving of all of the things adjacent to that and inherent to it like housing, employment, dignity. And I think that is in and of itself harmful to health, because we know that any kind of like hierarchy or like system of stratification of who is deserving of what isn’t a way to structure a world in which everyone is cared for it. This inherently means that some people will not receive what they need, and beyond what they need, what they want, like everything they want in order to flourish. Yeah, and so if we understand capitalism to be antithetical to that, then it is something that we do need to abandon it in service of a world in which everyone has access to what they need. Right.
Kavian Kulasabanathan 4:24
And I think it’s probably worth taking it even one step further and saying that capitalism, on the functioning of capitalism, is predicated on being able to make us sick, right. The way that health is, I suppose, mobilised or weaponised, not as something that is needed for flourishing and for reaching our maximum potential in a kind of an expansive sense, but actually, to be able to categorise us into productive for labour to be there and extracted to create wealth that is accumulated. Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Farzana Khan, who’s based here in London, really speak to this idea of temporal justice and the fact that part of the function of the capitalist project is that it steals time away from us. It extracts labor, but it also extracts good years of our lives. So it does not just make us sick, but actually, it kind of aligns and shortens what it is that we’re able to enjoy and flourish in.
“We need to push back against the manufactured idea of scarcity and actually come from a place of of overflowing abundance, right. And really of having an abundance of love, as the only truly infinite resource that we have.”
Visioning #1 5:41
To me, liberated future feels like and looks like liberated time. Time to be, to care, to plan time to learn, to grieve, to love, time to cultivate, to heal, to give our attention, and time to respond to the plural rhythms and timescales of the living world around us. I think time matters because so much violence has emerged from poverty and inequalities of time, from impositions of time. I think so much of our liberated world can be approached through a simple question; who has time for what? The luminous abolitionist thinker, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, has this incredibly spacious definition of racism; racism is state sanctioned production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death. There’s so much to sit with here. But I think a loose definition invites us to see oppression or oppressions as diminishing of time, as threats, and shortcomings of time. I think this invitation asks us to perhaps see repair as the alchemy of time and justice. It invites us to see liberation, through institutions, through communal bonds, that help expand and enrich our time. To me, a liberated future is one with time. And everyone who inhabits it is sacred.
Sarah Lasoye 7:32
My friend Miriam always says to me that the biggest question on her mind constantly, as someone who is probably one of the most well read and politically informed people that I know, is the question of “how do we live with and for one another?” ‘With and for’ is the route of what I think I want to advance towards, what I want us to move towards as a collective. Because that’s how I imagined an alternative economy or an alternative way of being it’s relational, it’s understanding that, like you say, health isn’t situated in an individual body, it’s not something that we can fix with an individual treatment that you buy, or by something you pick off of the shelf. It’s not something that you alone can work to accumulate enough money in order to solve and resolve yourself. We don’t live individualistically. And you know people have written extensively about how the pandemic revealed this to us beyond being an infectious disease, it highlighted how we are so entwined in one another’s lives. If you’re on a train in any city, but especially in London, and you look outside, and you see how many buildings there are, and I see how many people are in them, you’re scared. You see how many people are on the street. There are moments when I am overwhelmed, not because I think I don’t want to live amongst these people, but because I’m realising how close we are, how much our lives are completely enmeshed. And we’re taught at a very young age that that’s not true, and at most our lives are enmeshed with our blood relatives and the nuclear family, again, in service of capitalism. But I think recognising and building a “consciousness” amongst everyone and having this shared understanding that the better way to live will enable us all to be cared for and for all of us to have a rich and meaningful life with and for one another means a recognition that you have to give things up for other people to be well, as well. I think there’s the, you know, large scale internationalist frame of that, you know, countries that have been “overdeveloped” or like have extensive wealth and who have extracted wealth from other countries need to be willing and able and like act on the redistribution of that, but also on a interpersonal level thinking about what it means to give up some of your time to take care of someone you love, or what it means to - and I hate even like using the word give up — but just to offer or to even have the boundary of “offering” completely dissolved and to just live with and for one another, to not see it as something that is taking something from you to care for someone next to you, or, you know, somebody you’ve never met before. I think that’s so vital to how, yeah, I think it’s so vital to the way of life that I think would be good.
Kavian Kulasabanathan 10:38
No, no, I really hear that. And I guess I mean, I kind of sensed that in the way you were talking about it, but I don’t think it’s about giving up. I don’t think that’s the framing. I think it’s actually rather that we need to push back against the manufactured idea of scarcity and actually come from a place of of overflowing abundance, right. And really of having an abundance of love, as the only truly infinite resource that we have. And actually, that is, you know, a completely different framing that feels so much more in service of the idea of living life with and for other people. Then, you know, the paradigm of unblocking, of unfreedom, is really a violence. We’re cyclically caught up in and perpetuating it. I really resonate. I really resonate.
“Thinking about how our practice intersects with a new economy and these futures that we keep referring to, what might they look like? I think that has to be for me a central part of it, valuing lots of different forms of knowledge, valuing lots of different ways of healing.”
Sarah Lasoye 11:53
Yeah, because we have things to offer one another, right? But right now we’re not able to give.
Paul Robeson by Gwendolyn Brooks:
That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “where life is precious life is precious.” And I love that as a phrase because it shuts down the “well, what will we do if XYZ” kind of thinking that is based in scarcity, and based in an idea that abundance is impossible. It deflects that and says, well, life is precious, if we collectively decide. Also from a health background — we’re both from health backgrounds — if we collectively come to the work that we want to do with the foundational understanding that life is precious, then we should treat life as such. And that includes everyone like I mean, she’s talking about it in relation to the prison industrial complex, and people who have been relegated to the category of criminal, but it also extends to everyone who we see as undeserving of health care as it currently stands in health care. It speaks about how we treat disabled people, it speaks about how we treat trans and gender non-conforming people, especially in the current context, it speaks about how we treat anyone trying to access reproductive health care, mental health care, it speaks to how when we decide to really understand and agree collectively that life is precious, this completely reorients our whole way of being and what we consider important.
Kavian Kulasabanathan 14:18
Thinking about how our practice intersects with a new economy and these futures that we keep referring to, what might they look like? I think that has to be for me a central part of it, valuing lots of different forms of knowledge, valuing lots of different ways of healing. And I suppose really dissolving these hierarchies that we’ve constructed around certain ways of knowing being more valuable, i.e there is a doctor or there is a professional and they do this and they hold the knowledge that you seek. I suppose that they also make a decision as to whether you’re deserving or not of health, of care, of love, ultimately.
“I really find or conceptualise food, and the sharing of food, as a way of being in direct dialogue with land and with the nonhuman kinfolk that we kind of spoke about earlier on. It’s this beautiful cacophony of a multi-directional conversation between so many different forms of being.”
Sarah Lasoye 15:02
I love the question of like, what would a liberated world look like to you? Yeah, what does the world you want to live in look like? With economies, with ways of, you know, resourcing our communities that are healthy, in the sense that they serve us. And that they meet needs, beyond, you know, the basics of what anyone can survive on and go further into actually enabling us to thrive in that world. How you doing? What are you feeling like? What are you thinking, you know, what does it look like and feel like, to you?
Kavian Kulasabanathan 15:42
I mean you know, it really comes down to, I suppose, the embodied practice of being in nature. I think I like to rule my spirituality from the vastness of nature, as well as the microscopic tininess of nature and the vastness that lies in that. And so I think it looks like being in the sea, being in a huge lake, being up a mountain, being in a forest and lying on the floor, and just hearing and seeing and being, like we said earlier, ecologically continuous with that on which we stand. And then maybe drawing further on from that, that ecological continuity, to me really manifests as food, and as eating. So for me, that is such a big part of, of my life. The thing that brings me joy is to be in community with people through food. I really find or conceptualise food, and the sharing of food, as a way of being in direct dialogue with land and with the nonhuman kinfolk that we kind of spoke about earlier on. It’s this beautiful cacophony of a multi-directional conversation between so many different forms of being. And so I think cooking, eating, sharing in that is a form of embodied laboratory practice for me. Cooking and eating, and music and dance, are probably the things that I would really be be drawn to, and I think probably would be doing in a world that was liberated. And I think it is just like such a tapestry of all of these different threads being pulled together. So it’s a little, you know, it’s a community health center. But really, what are we talking about? We’re talking about space for plural ways of healing, of deeply embodied somatic liberatory practice. You know, I’m thinking of a little shared kitchen space, kids are running around because we parent as a community, there’s not any one person’s kid. We’re by the sea, there’s like a cooperative fishery, a little regenerative farming plot, there’s bees and a little mushroom farm. I’m thinking sauna, I’m thinking music space, we jam and dance in that, that is really the heat. That’s what I think about when I think of healing spaces, the intersection of all of those forms of embodied practice, which is what all of those things are, you know. You can put string boxes around what counts as embodied practice or whatever, but really that’s what that is. I first had an incredible somatic practitioner called Prentis Hemphill speak to that. Or maybe it was Alexis Pauline Gumbs. But yeah, around this idea of music and dance as the OG forms of embodied practice. That is what that is. And for me, I would extend that to eating as a healing practice. How can that not all be part of healing spaces that we that we want to vision for, that is in this liberated future? Yeah, I would say that in a long, roundabout way, those are the things that pop off in my mind.
“I’m imagining an economy, a way of organizing and resourcing our communities, that means that you can grow up and have like a rich childhood, you can learn what you want to learn, and what you’re interested in.”
Sarah Lasoye 19:34
Wow. Very gorgeous. Also, it’s nice getting to hear you talk about it and be beaming as you’re talking about. It’s so nice. Like, it’s so nice to see like a glimpse of that joy just come from like the seedling of an imagining of it. Because like, imagine how joyful the actual thing will be. I think that’s really lovely.
Visioning #2 20:04
But one of the things that I try and hold on to as a route to liberation is being able to deeply hold and perceive the way in which the Divine Spirit threads all living beings together. So we don’t exist within boxes or labels, but kind of that we have this deep perception of the way in which we’re all tied together as a species. At the moment you have to fight to hold on to all of these things. Like what would a way of living, a societal structure that recognises all of these things look like? Whether it’s our divine interconnection, interdependence, whether it’s a deep interest, which kind of leads to recognising the deep intrinsic value in all beings, our ability to love and be loved and our ability to perceive? What is the distraction? And what is the value? What would a society that is premised on those things look like? I guess those are the things that I’m trying to find ways to embody and practice.
Sarah Lasoye 21:14
I think I’m imagining an economy, a way of organizing and resourcing our communities, that means that you can grow up and have like a rich childhood, you can learn what you want to learn, and what you’re interested in, there are no necessities of hierarchy in the classroom, or even, you know, the dissolving of the classroom as a boundary. Learning and education happens everywhere in lots of different spaces. And there’s no requirement for you to meet X marker in order to access further education, or to even, you know, be able to live in a “better” way, because there won’t be a better way. It’s just like, everything will be accessible to everyone, nothing will be predicated on you performing “well” as determined by the state or whatever authority. Looking at it from the frame of a child living in a community and what will be available to them, and how there will not be like any form of scarcity introduced into their mindset, ever in their lifetime. I think that’s what I want, yeah, just to feel like you can grow and learn and be guided towards whatever takes your interest. And also naturally, just by the way that we would live together, you would care about everyone around you. You would want to offer, you would want to give, you’d want to be interested in what everyone else is doing and you’d want to live collaboratively because you’d see how much that offers back to you. And you know, I’m saying like children but it’d be across any room.
Kavian Kulasabanathan 22:47
Yeah, but I think that’s such a gorgeous point of departure.
Sarah Lasoye 22:59
Yeah, yeah.
Kavian Kulasabanathan 22:59
Excerpt from Experiments in Imagining Otherwise by Lola Olufemi:
That is, the future is not in front of us, it is
everywhere simultaneously: multidirectional,
variant, spontaneous. We only have to turn
around. Relational solidarities, even in their
failure, reveal the plurality of the future-
present, help us to see through the impasse,
help temporarily eschew what is stagnant,
help build and then prepare to shatter
the many windows of the here and now.
Reimagining Economics Possibilities also builds upon CIVIC SQUARE’s Department of Dreams portfolio of work, a site to imagine bold new futures that weave together the dreams of many.
Whilst understanding, investing, and unpacking the dark matter of large scale system change, we have learned quite deeply through the practice, inspirational movements, and from imagineers and pioneers that came before us that we must also invest in the dream matter — the artists, writers, designers, dreamers and creative visionaries — those who dare to dream up bold new futures for humanity, and have the capacity to stretch our imaginations further than we ever thought possible.
Thinkers, doers and makers dreaming beyond our existing systems have played, are playing and will continue to play a central role in crafting collective visions that transcend our current reality, and radically illuminate the responsibilities we hold to future generations. This is particularly driven by practices of imagination and identity, and, when woven together with dark matter findings and interventions, has the power to create a supernovae of transformation; the thinking, relating and behaving differently required to usher in a new reality that becomes irresistible, that we can all build and craft together.
Find out more by exploring the following materials from Department of Dreams 2020–2021:
Initial Dept of Dreams Blog — May 2020
Watch Back Re_ Fest Talks — June 2020
Dream Library Launch — November 2021
The Matter of Dreams: 2020–2021 — December 2021
