YSI ft. Degrowth Cabaret @ ISEE-Degrowth conference 2025

The Degrowth Cabaret is a performative and participatory event that invites conference participants and local audiences to engage with degrowth imaginaries in a vibrant, unconventional format. Rather than offering another lecture or panel, this will be a shared stage where young scholars, activists, artists (both professional and amateur), and creative producers co-create a unique cabaret performance that reflects, questions, and plays with the themes of post-growth futures—sufficiency, care, decoloniality, and utopia, among others.

This will be the first cabaret of its kind: an artistic intervention within the degrowth movement that challenges the boundaries between academia, activism, and art. Blending theatre, music, dance, storytelling, satire, and experimental formats—including performance-lectures and physical theatre—it is not just a show, but an invitation to co-create, co-learn, and imagine together. The Cabaret foregrounds critical joy, embodiment, and collective creativity as tools for socio-ecological transformation, offering new ways of feeling and acting upon economic alternatives.

The Degrowth Cabaret is a hybrid event that combines performance, critical dialogue, and collective creation to explore the pressing questions of degrowth and socio-ecological transformation. It will premiere during the ISEE – Degrowth Conference 2025 in Oslo, blending artistic expression, academic insight, and public participation into a unique format that invites audiences to imagine futures beyond the growth imperative.

YSI emerged in response to the 2008 crisis, as a space to incorporate new and critical voices into the conversation about our economic systems. We want to take that mission one step further by inviting young degrowth artivists to join us not only through theory and analysis, but also through artistic, embodied, and collaborative forms of expression.

The Degrowth Cabaret opens doors to new audiences. It creates a bridge between young scholars and artists, activists, and creative practitioners who may have thought YSI was not for them—either because they don’t have formal academic training or because they express their insights in non-traditional ways. These are people equally invested in the socio-ecological transformation we seek, but who speak a different language. With this project, we aim to build a new shared language—playful, critical, and inclusive.

By creating space for experimentation, imagination, and radical collaboration, the Degrowth Cabaret fosters new kinds of interdisciplinary dialogues and new ways of “doing knowledge.” In that sense, it directly contributes to the YSI mission of pluralizing economics and nurturing a new generation of thinkers and doers. It helps expand the YSI network into territories that are both intellectually and socially vital.