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Both Tutu and Bonhoeffer embraced conviviality as an attribute of Christian life, not only as theory, but also in practice. Both also drew from lived experience in an effort to articulate their respective theologies of conviviality. We discuss the experience of music and musical metaphors as a lens through which to explore this relationship between lived experience and an explicit theology of conviviality. Bonhoeffer’s metaphor of the “polyphony of life” is a product of his milieu and does not fully capture the conviviality implicit in his Christology (being-for-others). We argue that African manifestations of conviviality such as ubuntu and gbenopo, when understood as lived realities rather than isolated abstract concepts, make an important contribution to theological discourse, in general. In this case in particular, utilising ethnomusicology to attend to the polyrhythm in Ogu music enriches our understanding of what it means to be-for-others.

The degrowth movement lacks a concrete vision for technology, thereby disregarding a crucial aspect of the green growth narrative. This paper helps fill this gap by exploring the compatibility of Artificial Intelligence with a degrowth-related concept: convivial tools - tools that promote autonomy, creativity, and relationships among humans and with nature.Degrowth has emerged as a strong voice against the green growth narrative. However, it has so far left largely unshaped its vision for technology, thereby overlooking a pivotal element of the green growth narrative. This article contributes to filling this gap by analyzing the appropriateness of a digital technology, Artificial Intelligence, to a degrowth context. It does so through the angle of conviviality, a concept introduced by Ivan Illich and frequently used by degrowth scholars, which states that convivial tools should foster autonomy, creativity, and relationships among humans and with nature. This paper specifically applies Vetter's Matrix of Convivial Technology to an application of machine learning with potential environmental benefits: predictive maintenance - a proactive maintenance technique based on real-time sensor monitoring. Three key limitations to its conviviality are identified: 1. the high complexity of machine learning, 2. its environmental impacts, and 3. the size of the infrastructure it relies on. These limitations prompt critical reflections on the appropriateness of machine learning (as a part of Artificial Intelligence) to degrowth but also act as inspirations for reshaping the technology towards more conviviality.

The paper explores the development of attitudes and relationships toward Islam and Muslims in the Norwegian public context, as expressed in various central media and research. These processes are captured through analysing seven events decided to be ‘critical’ in the sense of having especial importance for such relationships. The processes evolve back and forth in the tensions between a three poled triangle: right wing extremism, Muslim extremism and what we have termed “extreme universalism”. Very few actors associate to its outer levels, as most social life occurs in between those extremities, where conviviality seems to be an overall direction.    

This article contributes to understandings of the conviviality which has dominated recent sociological approaches to urban multiculture. The article argues for conviviality’s conceptual extension by reference to recent rethinking of community as a profound sociality of ‘being with’ and a culture of urban practice. The article draws from a qualitative dataset examining sustained encounters of cultural difference and the relationships within social leisure organizations in three different English urban geographies. The article explores how the elective coming together of often ethnically diverse others, over time, in places, to do leisure ‘things’ meant these organizations could work as generative spaces of social interaction and shared practice through and in contexts of urban difference. The article concludes that putting conviviality as ‘connective interdependencies’ into dialogue with community as ‘being in common’ develops their sociological and explanatory power and counters the reductions and limitations that are associated with both concepts.

Environmental conservation finds itself in desperate times. Saving nature, to be sure, has never been an easy proposition. But the arrival of the Anthropocene - the alleged new phase of world history in which humans dominate the earth-system seems to have upped the ante dramatically; the choices facing the conservation community have now become particularly stark. Several proposals for revolutionising conservation have been proposed, including ‘new’ conservation, ‘half Earth’ and more. These have triggered heated debates and potential for (contemplating) radical change. Here, we argue that these do not take political economic realities seriously enough and hence cannot lead us forward. Another approach to conservation is needed, one that takes seriously our economic system’s structural pressures, violent socio-ecological realities, cascading extinctions and increasingly authoritarian politics. We propose an alternative termed ‘convivial conservation’. Convivial conservation is a vision, a politics and a set of governance principles that realistically respond to the core pressures of our time. Drawing on a variety of perspectives in social theory and movements from around the globe, it proposes a post-capitalist approach to conservation that promotes radical equity, structural transformation and environmental justice and so contributes to an overarching movement to create a more equal and sustainable world.

This paper critically engages with debates on race, conviviality and the geography of encounters. Where much of this work is undertaken in multicultural places, far less is known about the doing and undoing of conviviality in mainly white localities. The study further contributes to this work by offering a richly embodied account of racism and belonging based on the biographical testimonies of British Bangladeshi Muslim young women. Through these accounts, I identify topographies of power, social inequality and forms of exclusion that disrupt the melody of multicultural conviviality. I demonstrate the visceral aspects of race as it is summoned to life in live encounters, where it is lived on the body, bleeds into the locality and congeals around imaginary ideas of the nation state. I argue that antagonistic encounters that serve to mark out British Bangladeshi Muslims as Other' perform a bigger role: purging the nation, detoxifying it from encroaching multicultural intimacies and stabilising it as white. Despite this ritual cleansing I demonstrate how respondents are implicated in new forms of civic belonging, laying claim to nationhood, locality and rights to the city that subvert and hollow out the fantasy of a white nation.

Within the multicultural and multiracial city of Toronto Ontario, the space of the church is a place for racialized and white Presbyterian women to negotiate convivial hospitality, dignity, and notions of the good life. I use the concept of convivial hospitality to show how conviviality aligns with Christian hospitality when it centres on people’s will for spiritual and physical wellbeing through their relationships and interactions with others. This article focuses on the affective labour involved in the preparation of church community dinners, which were developed and organized by older, racialized Presbyterian women. Meal-time preparations are moments when convivial hospitality emerges among racialized women who pass the time by sharing their food, memories, and life stories, thus affirming a sense of dignity and belonging. Conviviality, however, takes an inhospitable turn when racialized women are subjected to undignified sociality. In exploring times when white Presbyterian women assisted with the community meals, the manner of their help coopted and disenfranchised racialized women from their service to the church and to God. What emerges is convivial inhospitality as racialized churchgoers are subjected to hierarchal interactions, making them feel like outsiders within their own church; yet, in caring for the wellbeing of white congregants to maintain social harmony and congregational unity, they tolerate the status quo which they see as Christian convivial hospitality.

Brazilians like to make brincadeiras (jokes) about everything, and these brincadeiras often reveal the contradictions and tensions of the particular ways in which Brazilians behave toward social difference. This article revolves around a remark made by a public figure about domestic workers and the organized resistance of antiracism activists and allies, with a focus on Benedita da Silva, a Black Brazilian politician who called out the racism deeply imbued in the remark. This study is rooted in my observations of the contemporary cultural and historical contexts, publications on Brazilian domestic workers, my research on the recent antiracist movement in Brazil, and equally so in a linguistic anthropological approach to discourse. I demonstrate that, armed with the language of antiracism, Brazilians increasingly metadiscursively dissect convivial humour in Brazil in terms of how it enables racist discourse among Brazilians.

The urban bench has been romanticised as a location of intimacy and benign social serendipity, and problematised with regard to perceptions of unwelcome loitering. In this paper we explore embodied practices of sitting on benches within an urban context characterised by corporate‐led regeneration and impacted by austerity urbanism, imperial history and ongoing racisms. Our schizocartographic methodology enables us to attend to the differentiated and shifting subjectivities and temporalities of bench users, and to emerging counter histories of space. The research is based on the case study of a central square in Woolwich, south‐east London. This involved an eclectic combination of methods, including film‐making, ethnography and interviews, and a cross‐sectoral team of activists, academics and an artist. The paper starts by conceptualising public space with respect to lived experiences of marginalisation, arguing that architectural design is intrinsic to understanding micro‐geographies of conviviality and care. The case study material is used first to provide a visual sketch of sitting and watching others in the square and then to address conviviality and the value of visibility and relative proximity in framing a mostly un‐panicked multiculture. Third, we discuss agentic, yet critically aware, acts of self‐care. Finally, our focus shifts to the design of the benches and the “touching experiences” of bodies sat in various ways, impacted by structural inequalities, yet differentiated by the particularities of individual or collective priorities. In conclusion we argue that attending to the precision of sitting on a bench can illuminate multiple temporalities of urban change in relation to both individual subjectivities and hegemonic structures. Further, the counter histories that emerge can inform policy and practice for inclusive urban design.

Abstract The multiscale nature of the environmental crisis brings together scientific and political mechanisms that converge on a common discursive axis: sustainability. This text contrasts vernacular and modern meanings of the commons and suggests conviviality as a counterpoint to the dilemmas posed by nature’s hypercommodification. Based on fieldwork, it describes governance parameters in the meliponiculture chain and the fishery management of pirarucu (Arapaima spp.) in the Amazon and the palm heart harvesting (Euterpe edulis) in the Atlantic Forest areas. It explores particularities in these resources’ governance as it aims to highlight possibilities and limitations to conviviality provided by these activities. For the cases studied, the convivial perspective is limited to cooperativism directed by the market. Still, a communal sense taken back as a principle for political action can offer broader horizons for the sustainability of governance. Resumo A natureza multiescalar da crise ambiental aglutina mecanismos científicos e políticos que convergem para um eixo discursivo comum: a sustentabilidade. Esse texto contrapõe sentidos vernáculos e modernos do comum, sugerindo retomar a convivencialidade como contraponto aos dilemas colocados por processos de hipermercantilização da natureza. Com base em trabalhos de campo, são descritos parâmetros de governança na produção de meliponíneos e da pesca manejada do pirarucu (Arapaima spp.) na região amazônica e do extrativismo do palmito juçara (Euterpe edulis) em porções da Mata Atlântica. Explorando comparativamente particularidades na governança desses recursos, objetiva-se evidenciar possibilidades e limitações à convivencialidade em seu regime de uso. Nos casos estudados, constata-se que a perspectiva convivencial tende a se limitar ao cooperativismo produtivista e conclui-se que retomada do sentido comunal como princípio de ação política pode oferecer horizontes mais amplos para a sustentabilidade dos regimes de governança. Resumen La naturaleza multiescalar de la crisis ambiental reúne mecanismos científicos y políticos que convergen en un discurso común: la sustentabilidad. Este texto contrasta los significados vernáculos y modernos del común, sugiriendo retomar la convivialidad como contrapunto a dilemas que plantean a hiper mercantilización de la naturaleza. Con base en trabajos de campo, se describen parámetros de gobernanza en la producción de meliponinas y en la pesquería manejada de pirarucú (Arapaima spp.) en la región amazónica y de la extracción de palma juçara (Euterpe. edulis) en la floresta atlántica. Al explorar particularidades en la gobernanza de estos recursos, el objetivo es evidenciar posibilidades y limitaciones a la convivencialidad en su uso. En los casos estudiados, la perspectiva convivencial tiende a limitarse al cooperativismo productivista y se concluye que la reanudación del sentido comunal como principio de acción política puede ofrecer horizontes más amplios para la sostenibilidad de la gobernanza.