July 2, 2025 12:00 PM UTC
Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada).
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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 moreExplore 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?
Rivers flow, shape landscapes, and sustain ecosystems. They have shaped civilizations, serving as cradles of culture, trade routes, and sources of spiritual significance. Across time, rivers have been sites of power struggles, symbols of freedom and migration, and spaces of ritual and renewal. Yet, in a world shaped by human-centered ways of knowing, rivers—both as physical entities and as metaphors—are often reduced to mere resources, named, owned, and controlled. How might we reimagine power, freedom, and ritual through the wisdom of rivers? How can we learn from their movement, fluidity, and resistance? What more opens up when we move away from the way rivers have been framed and understood from a perspective steeped in modernity?
Inspired by Dilip da Cunha’s book, The Invention of Rivers, which invites us to consider that “to 'see' a river as delineated by a line parsing water from land is a choice about how to see,” we offer this series of conversations as an opportunity to “see” the concepts of power, freedom and ritual through other eyes. Rivers of Becoming is a three-part interactive webinar series that brings together thought leaders, wisdom-keepers, and practitioners to offer participants potentially revelatory insights emerging from their diverse worldviews and life experiences. Hosted by advaya and ten (The Emergence Network), this series invites us to shift our perspectives, weaving together ideas and embodied practices.
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.
Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada).
Learn moreErin 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)
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 moreTyson 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.