25-27 April 2025
GalGael, Glasgow, Scotland
A call to gather and make, learn, play and share stories for commons and commoning
The world is on fire. Powerful institutions fail us – even as they seek ever greater control over social life, knowledge, production and nature.
Many people are increasingly abandoned and disenchanted in the world.
In such a world, where do we look to sustain our collective energies and imaginations? How do we nurture ways of living and getting along together that sustain our bodies, enrich our lives and help us build a better world? What sorts of stories help us make sense of the challenges we face? How do we grow kinships and networks within our communities – both social and ecological – so that they might flourish in and beyond times of rupture, uncertainty and change?
We all carry the answers – or the seeds of answers – to many of these questions in ourselves and our collectives, our ways of organizing ourselves and making sense of our social and bodily experiences, in our shared histories of knowledge-making, place-making and struggle in commons.
Commons aren’t just a ‘thing’, a resource or a movement. Commons (and commoning) offer ways of thinking collectively about what we create when we work together in our communities and movements. The ways we govern ourselves and produce social wealth. The politics through which we resist dispossession, domination and enclosure. The pluriverse of values that bind us together with each other and the more-than-human world.
Practices of commoning invite us to think about those aspects of society and the earth that support our common existence, but which have been or are being threatened with destruction, erasure, or enclosure by the state and capital.
Stirring up stories…
As folk stories like that of the stone soup* depict, alone we may be hungry and afraid of the unknown. Yet we all have something to bring – to build a fire to chase away the shadows and make a broth to fill the emptiness. Together we can find enough to fulfill ourselves and each other – sharing with our families and communities. In these ways we build up the strength we need to make liveable futures in a world that’s gone… weird.
We invite you to a dynamic and radical gathering – a convergence for the ‘commoners’ of Scotland, both practicing and aspiring. Together we’ll make a ‘strange broth’, stir up old stories and cook up new ones, form bonds, kindle new collaborations and find ways to take care of each other and our collective futures. Over the course of two days we’ll learn, work, eat, make, play and imagine together.
The gathering will be a space that we build together. Some of our aims include:
- To share knowledge and practical know-how to understand how these principles are being put into practice today
- To celebrate in ways that our commons are rooted in place and experience, whilst also seeding the ground for growing solidarities across different places, radical lineages and histories of struggle
- To explore the history and diversity of the Scottish commons, the principles that have helped sustain them and the challenges they have faced
- To ask how ‘commoning’ help us to tell new stories that radically reframe and situate our work develop methods, tactics and counternarratives for unlearning and undoing enclosure
- To bring our learning together in an assembly
In order to foster a dynamic and multidimensional experience and create space for reimagining our relationships, surroundings and commons, the gathering will be organized into four streams of activity:
- MAKE – e.g., cooking and eating together, making space, art, skill shares, collective making
- LEARN – e.g., teach ins, critical histories, embodied exploration, methods
- PLAY – e.g., role play, LARP, tarot, radical games
- STORY – e.g., story-telling, listening and sharing, world-building, re-storying our worlds
Get involved!
There are many ways to participate depending on your time, interests and abilities. You can join the planning group; you can volunteer to help with logistics during the event (e.g, helping coordinate food, safety or child care); you can propose to lead a session, teach-in or skill share on one of the streams; to be a rapporteur, or you can simply join the gathering as a participant. If you have another role in mind, or if you can’t join but would like to suggest another way to support, just get in touch!
If you would like to join the gathering, please respond to this call by 14 February 2025. To do this, use this form. You can tell us a little about yourself and your interest in the theme, propose a session and / or activity, and let us know about your needs (e.g. material/time costs, travel costs, accommodation).
Your information will only be used for planning purposes and for sending communication and updates about the gathering. It will not be shared beyond the organizing group without your explicit permission.
*ABOUT STONE SOUP: The title of the gathering takes its name from a traditional tale. There are many versions of a story of ‘stone soup’ from places near and far. One such version comes from Govan on the outskirts of Glasgow when hard lives were organised around the tenement ‘closes’. They carried tales from the lands they’d been displaced from – the Highlands, the Islands, the Lowlands or across the Irish Sea. But their version of ‘stone soup’ concerned their new lives in a Glasgow rapidly swelling through industry and trade. A family at the bottom of the ‘close’ would send a large, empty pot up the stairwell. One family offered an onion, another a few old carrots, another some potatoes, and perhaps another salt. The pot was soon filled with enough ingredients for a hearty soup to be shared by everyone. The tale reminds us that while alone we might not have much, together we can more ably meet our collective needs. Much like practices of commoning.