We’re thrilled to share what’s been going on at DGI and the Museum of Care this June and to invite you to join us for the future events.

Here’s what you’ll find in this month’s newsletter:

• Youtube discussion: Michael Hudson, Steve Keen, Hannah Appel
• Visual Assemblies: Frankfurt, Venice, Kenya
• Upcoming Visual Assemblies: New York, London
• Carnival4David: September 20, 2025
• Publishing
• Volunteer Program, Trip to Kenya
• What’s new in the Archive
• DGI Projects
• Open Source Food and Other Adventures
• Join the David Graeber Institute

Youtube discussion: Michael Hudson, Steve Keen, Hannah Appel

First up, we hosted another talk Michael Hudson in conversation with Steve Keen & Hannah Appel. If you weren’t able to join us live, you can watch the recording here. We’ve also created a few short videos highlighting some of the key moments and here is a transcript, thanks to Järvi Kotkas.

Visual Assemblies: Frankfurt, Venice, Kenya

June was a whirlwind of Visual Assemblies. Read Nika Dubrovsky and Miles Grant’s conversation about it. And here is our manifesto.

Honestly, there were too many to list!

Events took place in Frankfurt, multiple locations across Venice, and several in Kenya. We now have Visual Assemblies every Friday in New York!

If you’d like to get in touch with the organizers, write to v-a@davidgraeber.org.

Upcoming Visual Assemblies: New York, London

The main event we’re excited about is on July 25th—we’re hosting a Visual Assembly focused on migration. We’ll discuss how to transform refugee camps into Welcoming Centers. We’ll start with Goodie Odhiambo’s story—she works at the The Dadaab Refugee Complex, where people have been living for over 50 years. It’s hard to call that “temporary” anymore. Why has this situation lasted so long, and what solutions can be offered? We’ll explore this online with our participants from Kenya, Uganda, New York, London, and with all of you. Don’t miss it! Here’s the Zoom link.

If you’re in New York on July 25th, we’ll be in front of the Roosevelt Hotel on 45 E 45th St, at 11am! If you have any questions, feel free to email v-a@davidgraeber.org.

In addition, you can learn more about Visual Assemblies in New York and other countries here. And we’ve got downloadable templates for you to print, cut out, and use to create the structure.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Carnival4David: September 20, 2025

As we celebrate David Graeber’s life and work on the 5th anniversary of his passing, the LEAP Lab at the University of Cambridge and the David Graeber Institute are organising a day of festivities and workshops to bring his ideas to more people, promote the spirit of play, and build community.

Here is an open call that you can join.

Come join us! And write to us if you’d like to take part.

Publishing

The Little Book of David

We are finalizing a quote collection from The Little Book of David. Please check out the table of contents for the book. Here are two excerpts:

Capitalism has produced endless bullshit white-collar jobs, which are designed to make you identify with the sensibilities of managers. I call this managerial feudalism, whereby they keep adding more and more and more levels of intermediary executives. If you’re an executive you need to have an assistant or else you’re not important, so they hire these flunkies. It has to do with power, really.
(Is Your Job Bullshit? David Graeber on Capitalism’s Endless Busywork)

Abandonment of self, in a problem-solving meeting with the people you trust, is the form of pleasure if you do it voluntarily.
(The possibility of political pleasure: David Graeber at TEDxWhitechapel. 12 Feb 2013, 4:26)

We’re also thrilled to announce that our beloved publisher, Lux Éditeur, is releasing a new edition of Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber — featuring a powerful new afterword by Francis Dupuis-Déri, specially written for the French edition.

“Recognizing my comrades in Graeber’s words, I was moved to tears, partly because I felt a strong connection with this anthropologist, whom I had never heard of before, and with a whole community of fighters around the world.”

As part of the release, Lux is also preparing a series of short video commentaries by a range of thinkers, reflecting on David’s impact — particularly how Fragments helped shift public understanding and reshape what’s considered common sense.

We can’t wait to see it all come together!

As part of the next phase of our Made Differently / A4kids series — now taking the form of interactive doodle books — we’ll soon be releasing a new notebook for writing, drawing, and imagining.

Volunteer Program, Trip to Kenya

The DGI volunteer program continues to grow, and we are incredibly grateful to everyone contributing to our projects: the Museum, the DGI digital archive, and more. If you’d like to get involved, you can explore our volunteer opportunities. We welcome people of all backgrounds and languages ​​​​to help make our work accessible globally.

Please, write to us to help@davidgraeber.org

We’re also inviting volunteers to join our upcoming trip to Kenya, which we’re currently preparing. The plan, for now, is to cover food, accommodation, and local travel in Kenya.

We’re looking for people who can help us run Visual Assemblies across different parts of the country — in regional libraries, refugee centers, and underserved areas. One of the main goals is to build a gathering space on the grounds of the Nairobi Central Library, one of the largest libraries in Africa.

More broadly, we’re expanding our work in countries across the Global South. As part of this, we’re launching a series of monthly public lectures focused on colonial history in different regions.

To my surprise, during my visit to Kenya I found that many well-educated young people knew their own national history well — but very little about things like the opium wars in China, the mass famine in India, or the persistence of slavery in Eastern Europe long after it had ended in Western Europe.

As always, our lectures will be streamed online, but we’re also hoping to set up several in-person gathering points — places where people can come together to watch, and then participate in a 20-minute Q&A and open discussion with the speakers.

If you have access to a space — a local bookstore, cultural center, or art space — and would like to host one of these gatherings, get in touch.

And if you’d like to suggest speakers or participants for upcoming roundtables and public conversations, we’d love to hear from you.

The next lecture will take place on July 25, alongside the Visual Assembly in New York.

What’s new in the Archive

We spotted people engaging with the book “Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia”.

• An online book club run by Dan Allosso held three meetings to discuss the ideas of David Graeber.
• On Novara Media, Marcus Rediker, an American historian, writer, professor, and social activist, asked questions about enlightenment and striking egalitarianism.
• Fresh Lens Podcast aired a casual discussion where Trish and Hirad, two Graeber enthusiasts, latch onto Pirate Enlightenment, hoping to unearth intriguing connections between the call for political experimentation in The Dawn of Everything and pirate history.
• Srsly Wrong podcast invited Andrew Sage (Andrewism) to talk about historical narratives, challenged by David Graeber. They refer to David’s other work and ideas and add some funny sketches on the theme of pirates.
• Anthropotamus highlights some atypical aspects of pirates in the research by David Graeber.

The topic of bullshit jobs is being widely discussed. In the “On the reg” podcast, researchers talk about the AI aspects in their work, which apparently squares with the bullshit aspects, both causing the mushrooming of BS work. The Demystify Sci Podcast examines the impact of bureaucracy and financialization on modern society through the lens of David Graeber’s Utopia of Rules, with reference to another of his works, Bullshit Jobs.

Ashley Hodgson, a professor of economics, specialising in health care economics and behavioural economics, intends to complete a 4 part series covering the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

Here is the link to the first 3 parts.

While most of these podcasts are in English, we have also added links to podcasts in Catalan covering David’s work on Debt (here and here).

Many thanks to the volunteer Pere Carillo Camps for updating the material on the book Cities Made Differently: https://davidgraeber.org/books/cities-made-differently/

The archive has been updated to include the London Review Bookshop Podcast of 2019, a conversation between David Graeber and Astra Taylor about democracy. There are questions from the audience about debt, direct democracy, for-profit fundamentalist Christian churches, etc.

David Graeber talks about the occupy movement and democracy in the 2013 interview with Brian Lehrer.

We are always searching for content for the archive from all parts of the globe and all languages, so if you have any suggestions, do get in touch! Have a project idea that aligns with our values but isn’t listed? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at help@davidgraeber.org.

DGI Projects

David Graeber Music Library

“Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds”-–David Graeber.

You may already know that we started making a list of all the music David was listening to. At the moment, we have about 17,839 tracks listed. But this isn’t just about remembering David through the music he listened to or creating an archive. It’s about sharing our love and connection through music. We hope that the Music Library will work as a space where we can all connect, suggest, and discover. Let us know if you’d like to join in to make this happen: write to info@davidgraeber.org

Open Source Food and Other Adventures

Our Survival Kit Collection has grown. Here are the new additions, collected by Barış Eser.

The collection now features To Catch the Rain and To Catch the Sun, a collection of small-scale and accessible technologies for water-systems and solar energy compiled from the knowledge on Appropedia. We also added A Farmer’s Handbook, a manual on biointensive and sustainable farming by Ecology Action. We are also in conversation with the Low Tech Magazine to see how some of their DIY designs ranging from heating to power generation can be included in the collection.

If you or your collective has any accessible and low-cost designs that might be useful for the different self-sustenance needs of communities around the world, please reach out to us at survivalkit@davidgraeber.org!

Join the David Graeber Institute

We rely on your support to keep David’s legacy alive—challenging power, imagining alternatives, and building community. If you can, please donate today.

We look forward to seeing everyone at DGI and MoC!

Regards,
David Graeber Institute