Degree Name

MA in Sustainable Development

First Advisor

Paul LeVasseur

Abstract

New Culture is a network of people seeking to co-create a sustainable, violence-free culture through exploring intimacy, personal growth, transparency, radical honesty, compassion, autonomy, freedom of choice in interpersonal and sexual relationships, and the power of community. The network originated in the U.S. Sarah Taub and Michael Rios (along with many co-organizers) of an Arlington, Virginia based non-profit organization named the Center for A New Culture, have been offering weekend workshops, in which participants explore the possibilities of engaging one another according to principles thought relevant to the prospect of creating a new kind of culture. A longer event, New Culture Summer Camp East, is co-created yearly, which is an experiment in living together for ten days with new cultural principles, co-creating a group process which involves a sustained focus on building the attitudes and skills thought important to this work.

This project is a study of the experiment known as New Culture Summer Camp East. I look at the New Culture Summer Camp East event context and process, participant experience of it, and how they feel they’ve been affected or have changed their lives, and ways of being, as a result of their experience.

An aspiration I sought in this project has been to bridge a perceived disconnect in mutual understanding, between those deeply motivated to do the work of deconstruction of ideologies as a path to human psycho-spiritual freedom, and those whose focused approach is more the re-embracing of the spiritual and social value of autonomous, deeply intimate inter-personal relations, and restoration of authentic Community. Having begun my own psycho-spiritual transformational process in dialogue with Scott Peck (who observed no difference between psychological and spiritual growth), I see these focuses as mutually reinforcing aspects of one inseparable process of human renewal during this time of great turning. In constructing the theoretical framework and conceptual lens through which I observed and explored New Culture, I have written with the intention of articulating aspects of the profound process of “liberating supremacy from itself” (Frantz Fanon).

Disciplines

Sociology | Sociology of Culture

Download

Share

 
COinS