About this Event
Less Is Not Enough examines the rise of minimalist self-help, showing how it depoliticises middle-class frustrations with capitalist exploitation, and proposes a cultural strategy to channel minimalist desires into a more radical, postgrowth politics.
Through a critical analysis of self-help books, TV shows, and online communities, she argues that while minimalism is well-intended, it ultimately distracts from the root causes of the very problems it seeks to alleviate.
Trends like decluttering and mindfulness depoliticise middle-class frustrations with the capitalist exploitation of labour, attention, and ecology for profit.
The launch will be hosted by the Bartlett School of Planning Post-Growth Planning Cluster; and the discussant for the event wil be Dr Dom Davies, Reader in English at the Department Media, Culture and Creative Industries at City St George's University of London.
About the speakers
Assistant Professor of Literature & Art, Maastricht University
Miriam is Assistant Professor of Culture and Political Ecology at Maastricht University and currently Visiting Professor at the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London. She is the author of Less Not Enough: Minimalist Desires and Postgrowth Politics and Narrating the Global Financial Crisis: Urban Imaginaries and the Politics of Myth, and co-editor of Global Garbage: Urban Imaginaries of Waste, Excess and Abandonment and The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries. Her research focuses on postgrowth and cultural politics.
Reader in English School of Communication & Creativity City St George's University of London
Dom Davies' research explores the cultural politics of infrastructure and asks how practices in the arts and humanities can build community and justice around sites of infrastructure failure. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure (2017), Urban Comics (2019), and The Broken Promise of Infrastructure (2023). He is also the co-editor with Elleke Boehmer of Planned Violence (2018), among other collaborative works. He convenes the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network (TTiN), a platform for people working with infrastructure in the current conjuncture, and he hosts the TTiN podcast.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Central House, Room 225, 14 Upper Woburn Place, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
