The David Graeber Institute was founded as a platform for projects that build on David Graeber’s legacy. Our graduate program combines arts, social sciences, and climate research through engagement with Graeber’s archive, while collaborating with global initiatives and local communities focused on building resilience in times of crisis.
Our sustainably run physical space in Global South (or we would prefer to call it “Majority World”) will offer students and faculty access to a library and archive of published and unpublished works by David Graeber and like-minded thinkers in the fields of anthropology, economics, political philosophy, art, and technology. We collaborate across borders (in places like Kenya and the Caribbean) and, following the path of our other projects — Museum of Care and Visual Assembly — we aim to create a nomadic institution. It will be located in different countries, constantly moving, and relying not on property or bureaucracy, but on the people who shape it.
As the idea of Carnival is vital to DGI and the Museum of Care, we plan to explore Carnival as an economic, political, and artistic structure that is fundamental to all human societies. Annual participation in Carnivals should become a defining feature of our institute’s program.
The Institute plans to join a network of initiatives around the world dedicated to building local systems in which basic resources-food, education, energy, and medicine-are produced in abundance and distributed freely. Building on David’s idea of technology as an expression of social relations, DGI aims to foster a system of equal participation of all three disciplines: technology, arts, and humanities. We hope to support the development of intellectually intensive, but not labor intensive, non-proprietary open-source technologies that can be produced and maintained locally.
We believe that just and equitable resource redistribution is critical in the development of crisis-resistant social structures. Starting with St. Vincent, we hope to support and expand a decentralized network of projects addressing community resilience in the face of climate change around the world.
Our vision grew up from the Brain Trust project, that was originally set up by David Graeber in LSE and later developed by DGI in 2022/2023 in a series of public lectures and events in Rowley Way, London.