Rivers & Freedom
Free Webinar

Rivers & Freedom

July 1, 2025 11:00 PM UTC

Erin Manning Picture

Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada).

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Tyson Yunkaporta Picture

Indigenous skolar (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) working with Indigenous Systems Knowledge and collective Indigenous inquiry methods inflected with complexity science to resolve global existential threats and issues in regenerative design responses to crises. Works across disciplines in literature/creative writing, sociology of religion (disinformation/conspirituality/IO's), history, Indigenous Knowledges, psychology, environmental studies, architecture/engineering/Indigenous design and technology. Founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab.

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Explore freedom beyond the self—join Erin Manning and Tyson Yunkaporta as they unpack radical, relational freedom in a market-bound world. What if rivers, not willpower, led the way?

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About this webinar

Can freedom be understood beyond individualism? From a neurotypical perspective, many take freedom to be a quality of volition. Might there be a more radical freedom which arises from our acknowledgement of other agencies, from an awareness of something Erin Manning has called “the minor gesture”? In Quebec – on the land Manning stewards as part of the 3Ecologies Project – the rivers are public, unpropertied by markets. But paths have to be made through private property to reach them. The wild, unownable river-as-freedom can only be accessed through the limited logic of the market. In the second interactive webinar session of this series, Erin Manning and Tyson Yunkaporta will tread these uneasy terrains, asking where rivers take us when their unpropertied relations exceed the forms our marketable existences take and how our typical notion of freedom may be wrapped up in the limiting trifecta of volition, intentionality and agency.

What You'll Learn

  • Rethink freedom beyond individual choice, exploring its relational and collective dimensions.
  • Understand “the minor gesture” as a mode of sensing and moving with other agencies.
  • Examine how market structures shape (and limit) access to radical, unownable freedoms.

About your teachers

Erin Manning Picture

Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada).

Learn more

Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab (www.senselab.ca), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement. Art exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucarest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke UP, forthcoming), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014)

Tyson Yunkaporta Picture

Indigenous skolar (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) working with Indigenous Systems Knowledge and collective Indigenous inquiry methods inflected with complexity science to resolve global existential threats and issues in regenerative design responses to crises. Works across disciplines in literature/creative writing, sociology of religion (disinformation/conspirituality/IO's), history, Indigenous Knowledges, psychology, environmental studies, architecture/engineering/Indigenous design and technology. Founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab.

Learn more

Tyson Yunkaporta is an Indigenous skolar (Apalech clan (Wik) Lostmob Nungar) working with Indigenous Systems Knowledge and collective Indigenous inquiry methods inflected with complexity science to resolve global existential threats and issues in regenerative design responses to crises. Works across disciplines in literature/creative writing, sociology of religion (disinformation/conspirituality/IO's), history, Indigenous Knowledges, psychology, environmental studies, architecture/engineering/Indigenous design and technology. Founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab.