So much has happened in the world this year, and we are endlessly grateful to everyone who has been with us as we’ve created space to reflect on it together. What follows is less a summary of what happened than a reflection on the key moments that defined this year for us — and our hopes and work for what comes next.

A TRIBUTE TO KEITH HART

This year, we lost Keith Hart (November 6, 2025, in Paris) — the anthropologist who coined the concept of the “informal economy.” Before his fieldwork in Ghana in the late 1960s, this term didn’t exist. Keith also helped David Graeber find work in London after Yale dismissed him. He was a misfit in the best sense — the kind of scholar David meant when he said academia no longer makes space for brilliant outsiders.

Fifteen years ago, Keith gave an interview to Nika Dubrovsky in his Paris apartment predicting a 30-year US-orchestrated war in Europe, similar to the previous European war. People called him a marginal lunatic and Nika struggled to publish the interview because editors dismissed him as fringe. Today, that prediction looks prophetic.

This is a pivotal moment for DGI. We mourn together with his family.

Perhaps when David spoke about how modern academia no longer provides space for misfits but only admits the efficient, he was thinking of Keith Hart — who contributed more to the development of anthropology and contemporary knowledge than many credentialed and famous academics. DGI and the Museum of Care presented (here and here you can see the video) his final book, which he considered his swan song, and we encourage everyone to buy and read it.

As Keith Hart predicted, our world has moved even closer to war than we could have imagined. It still feels impossible to believe.

As the world slides closer to war, DGI responds by building what Keith imagined: spaces where human economy can be more than theory. .

PUBLIC TALKS & LECTURES

We’ve had many conversations this year across various formats and launched several new discussion series that we plan to continue. Our next step is to experiment with pre-recorded lectures, as a way of building a bridge toward a more explicitly educational version of the institute — one that could eventually offer a two-year program.

This year we continued our series on debt, empire and the future with Michael Hudson, who was joined by Yanis Varoufakis, Ann Pettifor, Steve Keen, Brian Eno and many others. The first step towards dismantling the skewed financial structures we find ourselves in is to remove the veil of obscurity about debt, money and everything economic that shrouds our collective understanding. We will continue these conversations next year.

We also launched our lecture series on colonial history. The first lecture was given by Radha D Souza, who introduced us to the Ghadar movement and how internationalist solidarities shaped the struggle for self-determination in colonised nations. Histories that have been willfully erased from most historical texts that we need to remember now more than ever. It is in these memories that we can draw strength to resist and face the current geopolitical turmoil. 

We also had one-off lectures featuring anthropologist Tim Ingold, climate scientist Ilona Otto, Poet and academic Benjamin Paloff , Science fiction writer and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow, , and musician and activist Brian Eno. We covered all kinds of grounds, from Bakhtin’s ideas to poetic technologies to art and tinkering during social collapse.
All our lectures are available on our YouTube channel.
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EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS & ART

It so happens that many of us are artists and designers. The artistic dimension of our work is crucial to us. Moreover, it looks pretty cool that our future institute will be dedicated not only to anthropology but also to art and engineering—an unexpected combination that perhaps only carnival can explain.

Don’t forget: all our exhibitions are free to download and display in your museums, schools, or apartments. Send us photos. Help to spread the ideas of AptArt!

APT/ART #2: MAKE CARNIVAL NOT WAR View exhibition | Download posters

This year, we created several exhibitions and launched a project bringing together international artists to design posters for David Graeber’s book collection The Ultimate Hidden truth of the world. 

Poster collection of 15 Artists: Ahmet Öğüt, Mandy El-Sayegh, Chris Haughton, Joan Cornellà, Rafaela Drazic, Frank Arbelo, Dima Kashtalyan (winner!), Zbyněk Baladran, Clive Russell, Gianluca Costantini, Matt Jones, Kolya Oleynikov, BOLOHO, Miles Glyn, Nika Dubrovsky.

VISUAL ASSEMBLIES

Something exciting happened this year: Visual Assemblies proliferated! Many were organized by friends of the Institute without our direct participation. We’re hopeful this means Visual Assembly is entering the toolkit for collective decision-making.

For the first time this year, we held a hybrid visual assembly, with participants from around the world joining chalkers on the streets of New York. They even came up with a manifesto! While we spoke with real-life activists working at refugee centers in Kenya, chalkers drew what our ideal migrant center would look like on the pavements directly outside the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, a migrant center that was shut down.

Nika also led a Visual Assembly in Bern, Switzerland, where we drew a vision of a future University (yes, we hope to bring this vision to reality).

Our last pre-New Year visual assembly took place at the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg. It may have been the best Visual Assembly that dedicated to the education of the future we have held so far. Above all, because the participants already spoke a common language. We had 4 organizers: Cory Doctorow, Alastair Parvin, Barış Eser, and Nika Dubrovsky. Unfortunately, we cannot share photographs because among the congress participants there are many people who, for various reasons, avoid having photos of themselves published in public spaces. But we can describe it in detail for you, which we will do right after the New Year as news on the DGI website and as an expanded description in the Museum of Care at the Visual Assembly’s room.

PUBLISHING NEWS

We continue to work on a new series of books by David Graeber. Sadly, no new titles of David were published in 2025, as we were in the process of changing our literary agency.

We are now very happy to announce that we are working with The Wylie Agency, which also represents many of our most admired authors, spanning a broad literary and intellectual tradition. Here are some of them: Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, Italo Calvino, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Roberto Bolaño, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Michel Houellebecq, Orhan Pamuk, and our beloved Maurice Sendak and Vladimir Nabokov. 

However, we’re hopeful that next year will bring several new David’s books we’ve been preparing—especially David’s textbooks on World History, Theory of Value, and Introduction to Anthropology, which are already complete and ready for publication.

At the same time, numerous new translations of David Graeber’s work have appeared in different languages, with several more already prepared for release next year. 

We are looking forward to messages from translators and publishers — please feel free to get in touch.

Survival Kit Collection and the David Graeber Insititue in Saint Vincent and Grenadines  
(December 5-12, 2025)

Our Saint Vincent trip (December 5-12) combined practical work with public lectures and dialogues. We built a spirulina farm inside the prison and installed a 3D printer with a machine that converts plastic bottles into printer filament. We hosted a dinner with inmates, prison administration, and DGI members, sharing spirulina-based dishes.

This created the Museum of Care and DGI first node in what we hope will become a growing network of Survival Kit Collection zones. We explored how technology, art, and education can come together to form what David Graeber called poetic technologies—understanding technology as social relationships rather than an autonomous force driving progress. As the world slides toward techno-feudalism instead of abundance, this is the territory where we can meet to change things for the better.

We believe it’s essential that practical action runs parallel with educational lectures, public debates, and gatherings of friends and colleagues to discuss what’s happening and adjust our trajectory. This time, besides our Caribbean friends, participants came from the USA, England, Italy, India, Germany, Georgia, and other countries. We need to act together.
This is how we’ll win!

The David Graeber Institute at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (December 27-30)

We’re excited to participate in the 39C3 in Hamburg! DGI organised a discussion between Nika Dubrovsky and Alastair Parvin on poetic technologies and the education of the future, based on the term coined by David Graeber and exploring the alternative between technologies that expand the space of human freedom versus technologies based on the utopia of order.

Carnival4David 2026 in Nairobi (31-10-2026) and around.

Beyond the annual Carnival, DGI will continue working on organizing David’s archive and building an educational institution in the Global South. We’re only at the very beginning of figuring out how to do this — and that’s part of the excitement.

How do we avoid the familiar traps of financialization and bureaucratization in education? How can education be free, accessible, democratic, and genuinely international? We don’t have answers yet, but we will experiment and share what we learn with everyone who is interested.

Among our art projects — alongside 3D musical instruments and carnivalesque anti-war banners — is a project by Nika Dubrovsky called Carnivalesque money. It is designed to expand and complement David Graeber’s collection while developing his ideas around social currencies.

DAVID GRAEBER’S LIBRARIES

So, finally! 
Our Music Library and our Book Library : https://music.davidgraeber.org/

Book Library (Книжная библиотека): https://library.davidgraeber.org/

We’re excited to share that the institute has finished working on publishing two online libraries of David Graeber.

Our music library has been refreshed, cleaned up, and is now actively growing with new collections. We have an amazing editor – Vladislav Bachurov, who wants to share his ideas about which collections connect to David’s texts and hear yours. We also plan to share interviews with musicians we’ve found in David’s collection. Send us the names of your favorites!

At the same time, we’ve just built a book library, which already features around 1,400 titles—with many more on the way. We’re testing it now and will open it in the first days of January.

We have big plans for both. Libraries are entire worlds: places where you can understand a person and their connections to ideas far better than through conversation alone.
 

See you in the New Year! 

If you haven’t contacted us yet, please do so in the New Year: propose your projects, join what we’re doing, travel with us to Kenya and Saint Vincent. But most of all, we wish everyone a joyful, carnivalesque New Year, full of care and freedom. May the year ahead bring less destruction, less cruelty, and less injustice.