Re-Rooting

Re-rooting is named here as the ongoing process and movement of cultivating new roots. In this respect, roots are not merely where we live, but the very context and soil that nourishes and supports our lifeworlds. Roots are the wellspring and foundation of human living: the ground from which we emerge and live as human beings, in community and in place. In a broad sense, then, re-rooting is part of a movement towards new ways of organizing human life.

Following this, the aim here is to provide the language, momentum, space, and conditions for inquiring into the re-rooting process, both as a structurally emergent pattern across time and space, and as something lived and felt from within. To do so, it gathers and develops conceptual frameworks, vocabularies, phenomenologies, methodologies, and practices that might serve this ongoing process and movement.

Worth mentioning here as well is that part of re-rooting involves the re-examination of the very way we go about producing knowledge. Most relevant to this inquiry is the sense that knowing and living are not separate things; that it is, as Rilke puts it, a matter of living the questions; that knowledge and practice are, at some level, one and the same. There is therefore in this inquiry a particular orientation towards the lived and phenomenological dimension: towards how to speak about re-rooting, how to make sense of it, how to orient ourselves within it and, in time, how to do it.