Radical hospitality in an age of mistrust

Join us in welcoming Sophie Craven back to the Convivial, this time as a guest speaker to open our new season of evening talks. Let your soft body love what it loves: Radical hospitality in an age of untruth In this session for The Convivial, researcher, facilitator & The Convivial founder Sophie Craven opens a rich, lively and hopeful conversation on what it might take for modern humans to trust each other again. What can we swear by, in these uncertain times? What, if anything, might radical hospitality have to do with it? And is there space, then, for opening out this hospitality to make good oaths with the more-than-human? Since humans became humans, there has been a concern with how we might know to trust one another. From blood oaths, to sacred covenants, to bumping fists, we’ve found ways to put our bodies on the line in the quest for trust between souls. Over the centuries communities have sworn allegiance to each other through various means; marriage, king-service, or the simple & tender everyday keeping of promises to show up for one another. We’ve shifted since the dawn of literacy from trust and faith into contracts, legalities and bureaucracy, in which we are held to account through legally binding forms. The body is either no longer present – e-signatures cut our hands off and remove the need for ink on paper - or indeed the body’s unique characteristics are scanned and stored for biometric identification. Everywhere promises are hidden in small print, a dozen oaths made every day without thinking. Over the last 100 years and more, methods of trying to trust each other have become increasingly anxiety-driven, and we’re often required to prove ourselves to be trustworthy and deserving through more and more bureaucratic methods (anyone ever written a funding impact evaluation?). But these days the written word itself is compromised, deepfakes abound, misinformation is spread by world leaders… So how can we trust each other now? Come take part in an imaginative exploration of what it might take to trust each other; from explorations of oath making, to beautiful and tender risk-taking, to radical forms of hospitality as we ask: can we let our soft bodies love what they love, and trust what they trust? And what would a cross-species oath-making look like with those who share our world? Speaker Sophie is an interdisciplinary facilitator, host, researcher and artist - and the founder of The Convivial. Her work revolves around developing and strengthening a sense of deep curiosity and rich community in spaces of learning and inquiry. For Sophie, learning together is one of the most beautiful, imaginative and critical practices for our times. She studied Social Anthropology & Arabic at SOAS before her MA in Poetics of Imagination at Schumacher College. Sophie is currently a Human Geography PhD candidate at University of Plymouth, studying what makes place sacred in contemporary times. Her wider research interests include mythopoetics, modern communal and prehistoric ritual and kinship, and ecophilosophy. What to expect • 6-6.30pm, arrive & settle • 6.30pm, introduction to the speaker • 6.40pm, talk begins • 7.40pm, dinner & continued discussion • 8.10pm, discussion activity • 9.00pm soft close