Frequently Asked Questions
What does Eddy mean?
We are excited about playing with the metaphor of counter currents or “whirlpools” that magnetize people around common visions and experiences like eddies forming in a stream or river, inviting them to eddy with us.
What is Eddy at New Paltz?
Eddy at New Paltz is an evolving, open, trans-disciplinary, co-creative, and embodied learning lab.
Our educational practices and systems unwittingly support the current paradigm that incentivizes competition, oppression, and extraction. How might we, together, live, learn and educate around values and practices that are care-driven, relational, restorative, regenerative, sustainable, and focused on the long-term wellbeing of all beings?
What?
We do all kinds of projects and events which support our mission of transforming culture and education as we knew it. We seek out opportunities for collaboration and dialogue across disciplines and beyond the classroom.
Why?
We are at an impasse. The systems that brought us here will not carry us into a thriving future.
We are driven by an awareness of the convergence of existential threats to future generations. We see the urgent need to tackle our rapidly mounting climate, biodiversity, environmental, social justice, and psychological challenges, which are outgrowths of our current socio-economic system that perpetuates exploitation, exclusion, and social injustice.
Where?
Our events, projects, and processes take place in a range of locations on the SUNY New Paltz campus and beyond. We hope to develop physical Eddy spaces on campus over time, which invite community gathering, interaction, and trans-disciplinary collaboration. And we are excited about connecting and collaborating more and more deeply with our larger Hudson Valley community.
How?
Since 2020, we meet weekly on Wednesdays at 8am to “eddy” together. In these gatherings, we collaboratively develop our vision and projects, meet with community members, write grants, and move projects and ideas along. To help this emergent work unfold and to prototype Eddy projects, we engage in a range of embodied practices and collaborative processes.
When: What’s the history of Eddy?
As COVID-19 hit in spring 2020, adaptive changes on campus started to happen quickly. In April, Andrea Frank wrote an open letter to the New Paltz community calling for proactive trans-disciplinary collaboration on campus to transform our educational system, frameworks, and curriculum so that we may educate toward a thriving future in the face of impending climate tipping points, accelerating species extinction, and deeply ingrained social injustice.
From there, a group of campus members ready to engage in a collaborative process formed. We started with a three-day virtual experiential think tank in the spring of 2020 hosted by Andrea Frank and Michael Asbill (as part of their tree speed collaborative artistic practice), and since then have met regularly to work through a process of developing community, a shared vision, and projects through creative processes and using metaphors.
The idea for a sustainability and Just Transition-based center or lab sparked during a gathering around a fire in the summer of 2020. In order to realize this vision, we decided to embrace the MIT Presencing Institute’s u.lab framework. This has allowed us to move through a structured process as a core and expanded group and connect with change-makers worldwide.
You can read more about this process here, and explore our current Newburgh engagement here.