Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies

Decolonizing Narratives in Communication: A Case Study of "The Tipping Point to Decolonise Sustainability"

Cinthya Sopaheluwakan — 2024-06-20

Narratives hold immense power in shaping reality and mobilising resources. Acknowledging the intimate connection between the climate crisis and racial injustices is vital. In this regard, decolonial perspectives are increasingly indispensable to tackling the challenges in this emergent crisis, where human-led corporations, practices, and politics drive ecological shifts. While techno-managerial solutions abound in our daily conversations and policy praxis, storytelling offers profound potential to reimagine our world. This article shows how collaborative practices are crucial in weaving together stories and experiences by echoing the emotional resonance of the climate crisis narrative to communicate our environmental reality and cultivate informed public awareness. Using the case study of The Tipping Point to Decolonise Sustainability, an initiative centred on climate storytelling, highlights how collaboration can spur discussions on decolonising sustainability. The article shows how we can craft an equitable future by acknowledging the power of storytelling and working together to communicate environmental reality.

Spiritual Courage and the Power of Partnership: How One Coastal Community is Changing Women's Health Care

Gwynne Guzzeau — 2024-06-20

Helping Our Women (HOW), a small 501(c)3 nonprofit organization serving women living with chronic or serious health conditions in the rural coastal region of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, US, has been operating as a partnership model for thirty years. This article reveals how Riane Eisler’s “right mindset” was present in the community culture that fostered HOW’s formation and is still present in its organizational DNA and explores how economically challenged rural communities value caring as essential work through their generosity and altruism. Rick Mauer’s Levels of Resistance model is used as a tool to explain some of the challenges of actualizing Eisler’s partnership ideal. Eisler’s foundational emphasis on mutual respect, accountability, spiritual courage, and equity is recognized as the through-line of continuous evolution and community resilience.

Land and Forgiveness: How One Woman’s Dream to Free the Land is Breaking New Ground

Eli Ingraham — 2024-06-20

This article explores the cultural, economic, and ecological challenges of the Die Bevryde Grond Trust and communities of the larger Valley of Grace in the Breede River Basin of South Africa. It examines how ‘Deep Forgiveness’ inspires acts of practical love through reconciliation, restoration, and regeneration. This is the story of Aletta Venter, a South African farmer and descendent of European colonials, who created the Die Bevryde Grond Trust, or Freed Land Trust, to prioritize land stewardship over land ownership. It chronicles Venter’s pursuit of emerging technologies (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, blockchain, tokenization, and community currencies) as the new plows and seeders to actualize her bold dream to free the land. Venter’s story touches on all four cornerstones of Riane Eisler’s Partnership Framework: Gender, Family/Childhood, Economics, and Language/Narrative. Eisler urges that clarity of vision is required for new ideas to be translated into new realities. Venter embodies this vision by partnering with Indigenous farmers, technologists, and social scientists, to forge a new narrative of our enduring relationship with The Land.

Call for Papers: 10th Anniversary Issue

IJPS Editors — 2024-06-20

The second issue of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies (IJPS) in 2024 celebrates the 10^th anniversary of the journal. We honor the past by looking to the future. The theme of this issue is Building a Partnership World.

For the anniversary issue we invite authors to imagine the partnership-based future that we are co-designing. We especially invite previous IJPS authors to describe the future that their cultural transformation work is helping to create. What will this future mean for education, agriculture, our cities, our governance? What will a partnership-based future mean for our children, for elders, for currently marginalized peoples, and for the rest of Nature?

The submission deadline is September 15th, 2024. See the PDF for complete information.

A Partnership Perspective on Ecosocial Reciprocity for Cultural Transformation

Angelica Walton — 2024-06-20

Eco social health is the impact of our biology by social, economic, and environmental influencers which inform how the psychosomatic body as a whole system functions. Social effects of dominative societies and structures lead to human disease through complex dimensions of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual disconnection. Partnership practices are foundational for the innate biological human need for social connection in health. In a world burdened with the global phenomenon of disconnection, a paradigm shift which honors and respects the critical necessity of healthy biodiverse relationships of all members of the ecological community are needed for the development of sustainable cultures of reciprocity and wellness. Global partners demonstrate the impacts of valued education that exist in cultures of partnership systems. Education is the cornerstone reimagining a new world of pace and health. Applying the partnership qualities as foundation to the learning environment may serve as a framework for building safe and inclusive spaces that foster curiosity in order to transform sociocultural practices and empower global perspectives.

Colonial Sustainability: Tracing the Sustainability Industry’s Ecocidal Lineage from the Doctrine of Discovery

Christina M. Sayson — 2024-06-20

The concept of “sustainable development” fuelling today’s sustainability industry may be traced back to the turn of the 14th century. The Holy Roman Empire’s imperialistic expansions into Africa and the Canary Islands eventually morphed into a burgeoning capitalist European colonial project, which then sought to undo the very environmental harms it had wrought through colonial extraction, through further colonial domination and social control. Post-World War II “peace” efforts birthed supranational entities that continue to impose white supremacist epistemological systems, frames, and standards on the neocolonised Global South. These impositions led to the creation of the contemporary sustainability industry, enabling the obfuscation of Global North expansionism through the application of white supremacist, Western-centric sustainability rhetoric. The cultural evolution of “sustainability” moves steadily apace as decolonial counternarratives struggle to materialise amid active silencing and stamping out by the mechanisms of coloniality.

Community Currencies for a More Just and Equitable Society

Caroline Dama Madagow — 2024-06-20

To address systemic inequalities in our world, we need to re-imagine money, how it flows, and how it can be used as a tool for prosperity rather than a tool that deepens economic and social divides within communities. Most current monetary systems reward extractive tendencies, disassociating us from each other and from nature. These maladaptive systems alienate and suppress vulnerable communities, defining their value to society in reductive economic terms. Consequently, other inherent skills and resources that a community offers are overlooked. This article explores how community currencies, defined as local forms of exchange designed to support and strengthen local economies, can be tools for shared prosperity. It examines how these new social technologies have the potential to redesign how money flows in a more holistic and beneficial way.

You Teach, I Engage: A Conversation with Dr. Fang Lei

Riane Eisler — 2024-06-20

Riane Eisler interviews Dr. Fang Lei, the new Managing Editor of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies and an Assistant Professor at School of Nursing at the University of Minnesota.

Shining As Illuminators Around A Shared Vision For Our World: A Conversation with Eli Ingraham

Riane Eisler — 2024-06-20

Riane Eisler interviews Eli Ingraham, recent CEO of the Center for Partnership Systems and currently working with the Transition Collective on bioregional efforts in South Africa and North America.

Artists' Statements: IJPS volume 11, issue 1

Ani Ganzala — 2024-06-20

View the art/music

Ani Ganzala and Taya Mâ Shere first met in an artists’ commune on the sacred shores of Bahia, Brazil, and have remained close friends ever since. Their creative work is rooted in ancestral dreaming, earth reverence, and spiritual activism. The curation of Ani’s visual art with Taya’s music in this journal was sparked by their recent retreat time together. Ani’s two pieces featured here are: “Aruanda,” (this issue's cover art) which highlights the relationship between the Black Diaspora and botanical technologies for physical and spiritual healing; and “No mundo aquático dos peixes e réptais, nós sonhamos / In the aquatic world of fish and reptiles, we dream,” which depicts physical and spiritual connection through black and queer love. Taya Mâ’s music is deeply rooted in her ritual and spiritual practice. Her piece featured here, “solidarity,” is a love song for liberation, an invocation of interdependence, and a call for collective care across realms.