Visual Assemblies - Bern

The main project of DGI continues to be establishing the David Graeber Institute in the Global South. In spring, we conducted a practical and theoretical trip to Saint Vincent, including a research mission at the prison, and continued the playground project and the spirulina workshop. We are returning to Saint Vincent from December 5-12 and will report back to you afterwards.

Tim Ingold on Sharing time: art in a possible world

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist whose ideas and works certainly capture the spirit of many of our projects, including the Visual Assembly. Tim joined us in November to talk about ‘Sharing time: art in a possible world.’ Tim challenged the notion of art as the culmination of ideas born in the mind of a lone creative genius. He described the artist as a heightened, open receiver to the world itself. Art transcends any chronological limits imposed on it; instead, it takes a life of its own, inspiring in all ‘amor mundi’ a love for the world, a love which we seem to have lost.  

After his lecture, we also had a fascinating discussion about what a university in a ‘possible’ world could look like. He spoke about this brilliant manifesto that he and others had put together for the University of Aberdeen, which shaped a little revolution there. Tim’s latest book old ways, new people, Anthropology and/as education, also talks about ‘a university for the common good’

We are excited to continue this conversation as we reflect on the formation of the David Graeber University in East Africa. In case you missed it, here is the link to Tim’s Lecture. 

Carnival 2026: last Saturday of October 

This year, we’re starting to prepare for David’s annual Carnival well in advance and we are moving to East Africa! Our partners are the Kibera Art District, set up in Africa’s largest informal settlement with 37 artist studios and production facilities. We also plan to continue carnivals in Rowley Way (if you want to connect with organisers, email Katia Egorushkina.

As always at DGI, we try to combine practice with theory. As part of this project’s preparation, we organised a public talk, followed by a Zoom planning session with our friends from Kibera, our partners from social currency networks, artists, engineers, and activists. Our next meeting will take place around mid-December, and DGI’s trip to St. Vincent. Please write to us if you want to participate, and also what you do and how you would like to help.

Benjamin Paloff on Bakhtin’s adventures

Benjamin Paloff is a poet and scholar who has long delved into Micheal Bakhtin’s work. Benjamin joined us to discuss Bakhtin and explained how Bakhtin has not only influenced his scholarly and literary work but also his life, shaping his views on ethics. Benjamin spoke about how Bakhtin’s ideas about literary design suggest that there is freedom to be found in an unfree system. The characters’ lives are beyond the author’s narrative control. Benjamin said that Bakhtin’s work itself, when liberated of the chronological order in which it is presented within the academe, illuminates that it’s not literary criticism but rather ethics that occupy Bakhtin. According to Benjamin, Bakhtin’s ethical project is to ‘reassert the full personhood of every person in the world.’  It’s easy to see why Bakhtin was also an essential influence in Davids Graeber’s life and work; in fact, Rabelais and his world were one of the books that David took with him to Madagascar, where he wrote ‘Lost People’.Following Benjamin’s lecture, we had a brief working group where some friends of DGI gathered to revisit our thoughts on carnival as a reinvigorating force for shifting common sense.

Benjamin’s talk helped us dive back into Bakhtin together and explore how his thought resonates with our current moment. To find out more, take a look at Benjamin’s book Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning and in case you missed it, here is the link to Benjamin’s lecture. 

Visual Assemblies – Bern

In November 2024, as part of the Sommerakademie Paul Klee in Bern, Swiss students and curators did a visual assembly together with participants from Kibera Arts District in Nairobi—a network of workshops and studios in one of Africa’s largest informal settlements. The task was to design a dream university on 1 hectare for 100 people. What emerged: lots of small spaces instead of one big one; everything temporary and constantly reassembled; open kitchens; and gardens for self-sufficiency, and we learned a lot from people who actually do things, not just talk about them.

What’s Next?

Upcoming Public Talks

We continue to bring more lectures, discoveries, and encounters to everyone all over the world. Below is our list of upcoming talks as well as information about new lecture series, we hope to launch soon!

All our talks will be streamed live on the DGI Youtube channel. Don’t forget to subscribe to get the notification when we go live.

Cory Doctorow and Brian Eno on poetic technologies

Cory Doctorow and Brian Eno will join us on December 8, 2025, 6PM London time  to discuss poetic technologies. Link to the live stream is here. 

Cory Doctorow has worked for many years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, advocating for digital human rights. An excellent science fiction writer, blogger, and journalist, he also coined the term ‘enshittification’, which captures how we’ve all experienced the decay of online platforms and services.
Brian Eno is one of the world’s most creative and inspiring musicians, visual artists, thinkers, and activists. A founding member of the British band Roxy Music, he coined the term “ambient music” and is a pioneer of electronic and generative music. He founded the Long Foundation and has been an important activist and advocate for human rights worldwide, whether it is the genocide in Gaza or divisive politics in the UK. 

Their talk will be a public hybrid event — both offline and online. James Schneider and Nika Dubrovsky will join us from the West Indies University in St. Vincent in the Caribbean, where we’re currently building a Spirulina farm inside a prison and setting up a 3D printer lab. The discussion will explore social technologies — how technology and social relations shape each other. This project is part of our broader public outreach, linking conversation and theory with practical projects and artistic initiatives. 

Ilona Otto and Steve Keen on tinkering through social collapse

Ilona Otto and Steve Keen will join us to discuss tinkering our way through social collapse on December 9, 2025, at 6 PM London time/1 PM New York time. Link to the live stream is here. 

Their discussion will explore how we can get out of the impending social collapse and move away from a business-as-usual mindset. What kind of overshoot management strategies do we need? How can available technologies or not-yet-available technologies help? What kind of policies do we need, and how do we get there? This talk will also be a public hybrid talk both offline and online a part of our program during our visit to Saint Vincent.

Ilona M. Otto is a Professor of Societal Impacts of Climate Change at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change, University of Graz. She leads a research group focused on Social Complexity and System Transformation, aiming to leverage complex systems theory and innovative research methods to analyze social dynamics and interventions necessary for transformative changes in human interactions with nature over the next 30 years.

Steve Keen is an economist and author. He is a vocal critic of neoclassical economics, which he believes relies on flawed models that overlook the inherent instability of financial systems. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at University College London and has previously held positions at the University of Western Sydney and Kingston University. Steve was one of the rare economists to predict and publicly warn us of the 2008 financial crisis. Steve’s books, including “Debunking Economics” and his popular YouTube channel, have been crucial in helping us understand the nature of banks and money itself.

Colonial Histories: Radha D’Souza on the Ghadar movement

Radha D’souza  will join us on the 18th of December at 6PM London time as the first speaker in the colonial history lecture series, she will speak about: the Ghadar movement. . The link to the live stream is here. Radha D’Souza brought to our attention that many histories of solidarity across international movements for self-determination have been marginalised. The Ghadar movement is the first truly international movement of colonised people that shook the British Empire, a movement from which there is much to learn for activists and engaged scholars today. 

Radha D’Souza is a Professor of International Law, Development and Conflict Studies at the University of Westminster, London (UK). She is also a lawyer, activist, writer and researcher. Her research draws on law, history, comparative philosophy, developmental studies, and geography to understand the entanglements of the colonial past and the colonial present, and incorporates perspectives from the global south. As an activist and organiser, she has worked with labour movements and social justice movements which address the impact of international economic policies on developing countries. She has written extensively about anti-colonial movements in South Asia, colonialism and international law. She has authored books, including: What’s Wrong With Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations (Pluto, 2018) and Contextualising Interstate Disputes Over Krishna Waters: Law, Science and Imperialism (Orient Longmans: 2006). Her most recent work with Sunera Thobani; Decolonizing Knowledge Looking Back, Moving Forward, is an intervention into contemporary debates on decolonizing curricula and universities, arguing that these calls need to be firmly engaged in wider social practices for justice. She also founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes(CICC) with Artist Jonas Staal. A recent iteration of CICC put the East India Company on trial in a public court at the Serpentine Gallery in London. 

Michael Hudson and Ann Pettifor on Debt Empire and the Future

On December 19th 5PM London time Michael Hudson will be joined by Ann Pettifor as part of our ongoing dialogues on Debt, Empire and the future. Together, they will discuss:

• How the legacies of imperialism and debt continue to shape the world order;
• What true economic sovereignty for the Global South could look like;
• Practical strategies for rethinking value, debt, and care in a changing world.

These dialogues continue Graeber’s and Hudson’s shared commitment to exposing injustice and imagining new possibilities for global solidarity and economic transformation.

Subscribe and turn on notifications for our youtube channel to keep updated with all our streams.

The David Graeber Institute in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

Our trip to Saint Vincent takes place December 5-12. On December 7th, we’ll install a 3D printer and spirulina production kit at Saint Vincent prison. We’ll host a dinner with inmates, administration, and DGI friends, serving spirulina pasta, spirulina bread, smoothies, and salads.

Why does this matter? We live in a world where technology is seen as an autonomous force driving progress. But instead of moving toward a society of abundance, the world is sliding toward techno-feudalism. David Graeber described technology as social relationships—a territory where we can meet to change the world for the better. The 3D printer will enable creating tools, prosthetics, and educational materials directly within the prison. We’ll also host a Zoom brainstorm on taking this project further. 

DGI and the Museum of Care at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress

We are happy to take part in the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in Hamburg between 27-30 December.  At the CCC Nika Dubrovsky will be giving a talk in the Arts & Beauty Sunday, December 28th at 22:05 (10:05 PM) in room Fuse. Nika will speak about “poetic technologies”—David Graeber’s term for understanding technology as fundamentally human practice and social relationships, not impersonal mythical “means of production” that mechanically transform society. Technology doesn’t drive history. We do. Nika will talk about the crucial connection between theory and practice: from Brain Trust ideas to the Survival Kit Collection through DGI and Museum of Care projects.

Barış Eser, Nika Dubrovsky, and Alastair Parvin will be hosting a Visual Assembly about the Museum of Care—exploring what if we built places set up for the reproduction of human life rather than for storing value in objects? The challenge is also how to make it in real life. With our participation, we would like to spread the ideas behind our projects, the Museum of Care and its child project, Survival Kit Collection. If you have ideas for the Survival Kit Collection, don’t hesitate to meet us at the congress or send us an email!

Updates to the music library

Music library has grown to include Cosmonauts (who call their distorted, amped sound “drug punk”), Cracker (style of rock that few bands can replicate- somewhere between 90’s college rock, outlaw country, grunge, and folk) or Creedence Clearwater Revival (at a time when prog rock dominated the San Francisco music scene, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s roots rock was an offbeat standout. Their country sensibility made them possibly the most popular band in America, with nine Top Ten singles in three years).

The music library project is growing, and more and more tracks can be listened on the library page. Take a look at the working-class music collection from the 1970s! Please get in touch (help@davidgraeber.org) if you wish to help us link the tracks!

Updates to davidgraeber.org

David Graeber’s archive on the davidgraeber.org webpage has been updated to include recently published translations, reviews, interviews, and articles. David’s Ideas continue to illuminate us about the workings of the world and are widely discussed. Here are some interesting reads:

• What David Graeber can teach you about narco gangs, airports and your boss (Brett Scott Nov 2025)
• On David Graeber’s Ideas About the Structural Stupidity of Bureaucracy (Stuart Jeffries Nov 2025)
• The David Graeber question (Richard Murphy Nov 2025) 
• Pirates of the latter day: or, lights for a dark age (Chris Smaje Nov 2025)
• When Regulation, Not Capitalism, Creates Fake Jobs (Alexis Sémanne Nov 2025)
• Bullshit jobs in literature (Leticia Asenjo, Nov 2025) in English and in Catalan
• David Graeber’s rhythm of developing thought (Claudio Sopranzetti, Apr 2025)

Earlier articles by David Graeber that are now available on the website:

•  “Manufactured ignorance: The strange case of Juan Cole and the Kurdish Freedom Movement, and the International Liberal Intelligentsia”, 2018
• “Why are people such suckers?”, 2018
•  “Beads and Money. Notes toward a theory of wealth and power”, 1996

Also, articles in the collection “Possibilities” are now available separately:

• No 1: Manners, Deference, and Private Property: or, elements for a general theory of hierarchy
• No 2: The Very Idea of Consumption: Desire, Phantasms, and the Aesthetics of Destruction in Western Society
• No 3: Turning Modes of Production Inside Out Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery
• No 4: Fetishism as social creativity
• No 5: Provisional Autonomous Zone: or, The Ghost-State in Madagascar
• No 6: Dancing With Corpses Reconsidered: An Interpretation of Famadihana (In Arivonimamo, Madagascar)
• No 7: Love Magic and Political Morality in Central Madagascar, 1875–1990
• No 8: Oppression
• No 9: The Twilight of Vanguardism
• No 10: Social Theory as Science and Utopia: Or, Does the Prospect of a General Sociological Theory Still Mean Anything in an Age of Globalization?
• No 11: There Never Was a West: Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces in Between
• No 12: On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken Windows, Imaginary Jars of Urine, and the Cosmological Role of the Police in American Culture

We are constantly expanding the multilingual database. Please get in touch help@davidgraeber.org if you know that there are materials in your language not yet represented on our website.

Articles

• “The New Anarchists” in Finnish (2020), “Debt, violence, and impersona markets: polanyian meditations” in Hungarian (2012)

News from publishing

We are very happy to announce that The Dawn of Everything Receives 2025 J. I. Staley Prize for Anthropological Excellence. 

We are also pleased that access to David’s work is constantly increasing thanks to translations into many languages as well as his work being reviewed worldwide.
Books 

• “The Dawn of Everything” in Hungarian, “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World” in Finnish (2025), Slovak (2025) and French (2026), “Revolution in Rojava” in German, “On Kings” in German (2022( “Pirate Enlightenment” in Spanish (2024)

Reviews

• Reviews were published on “The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World” in Finnish in September and October 2025.
• “Revolutions in Reverse” (by Hans Marius Hansteen and Alex Sager), “ Debt, the first 5000 years” (by Hasan H. Karrar) 
• Reviews on earlier publications include: “Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams” review in Czech and Finnish, “Bullshit Jobs” in French

Call for Volunteers

Survival Kit Collection: We’re working on an open call for survival kit collections and would welcome artists, scientists, activists, programmers, and all good people who want to join us survivalkit@davidgraeber.org,  info@davidgraeber.org and info@davidgraeber.institute

Library Projects: We’re building David’s book and music libraries as personal collections with stories from his friends and collaborators. We need editors and people with ideas to help gather multilingual content about the books and music that shaped David’s work. Email us at help@davidgraeber.org

Beyond the libraries, volunteers can help monitor and post mentions of David across languages, translate his work and texts about him, and serve as language editors. We’ve automated the monotonous tasks, so all remaining work is creative, personalised, and collaborative—we deeply value your input in shaping these projects.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Publishing as a Colonial Enterprise: Most books are published in English first, then translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Malagasy—much later, if ever. This is wrong, and it’s exactly why David Graeber was an anthropologist! Let’s track how David’s ideas travel across languages: his works, commentary on his work, critiques (perhaps even more interesting than praise!). We’re seeking language editors who can start with French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Russian. We’re automating link collection so the remaining work is creative and collaborative—your input matters. Please get in touch with us if you’d like to help! help@davidgraeber.org

Get Involved: As our projects grow, we’re actively seeking partners, collaborators, and volunteers. Whether you want to join our Survival Kit Collection/Lab of Care efforts, support our publishing initiatives, or contribute to our visual assemblies and public outreach programs—we’re open to your proposals. If you’re interested in any of our projects, have ideas to share, collaborations to start, or worlds to build, we’re always eager to hear from you: help@davidgraeber.org

Support DGI

Inspired by David Graeber’s work, our mission is to unite students, scholars, and local communities in collaborative learning through our public events, talks and community initiatives like the Museum of Care.  If our mission speaks to you, consider supporting our work.

We look forward to seeing everyone at DGI and MoC!