STUDY —
Social Therapeutics Online
We Have Never Known What to Do
A Practical-Critical Exploration of Unknowability and What Can Happen When We Embrace It
Governments, corporations, and political parties focus on goals, products and results. They have agendas, make plans, set objectives— with no way to realize them. Goals, agendas, analyses, programmatics, and adherence to ideologies can feel comforting at first, but given that human (and other) life is an ongoing, unending process — and processes are inherently unknowable — goals soon become burdens that weigh us down and drown social movements attempting to improve the quality of life.
What if instead of thinking we know what to do, we embrace the unknowability of it all? What if we accept that our best hope is our scrappiness as a species, our ability to make use of whatever there is–even the crap–to keep going? What if instead of asking “What Is To Be Done?” we come together and start building and creating new possibilities? These are the kinds of questions Lois Holzman, author of The Overweight Brain: How Our Obsession with Knowing Keeps Us from Getting Smart Enough to Make a Better World (and co-author with Fred Newman of The End of Knowing) will be posing during her 12-week online course “We Have Never Known What to Do.”
While the powers that be attempt to impose a top-down globalization on a world in chaos, there is a growing network of activists embracing the unknowability of it all, crossing political and cultural borders, creating with and transforming what is, bringing into being a grassroots globalization unencumbered by goals and ideologies. Guest speakers will share what it’s like for them to embrace unknowability in their work and lives. The course is, among other things, an invitation to jump in and play with them.
Stay tuned for news of 2025 programming.
Registration: $500
Click here to apply
A limited number of partial scholarships available upon request.
Lois Holzman is founder (with Fred Newman) and director of the East Side Institute, a center for social therapeutics and other humanizing approaches to the learning and development of people and communities. As an activist-scholar, her work is political-philosophical, community-located and international. She is a founder and the chair of the Performing the World conferences and a leader in the social change movement known as performance activism. Lois introduces performatory approaches to human development and social change to hundreds of grassroots practitioners and supports their home-grown initiatives to develop people and their communities in order to engage poverty, violence, conflict, underdevelopment and environmental destruction. Lois is the author of 10 books – including her latest The Overweight Brain – and dozens of chapters, articles and essays, some featured in Big Ideas and Revolutionary Activity.
