Post 160.
Conviviality is Relationality, by Daniel J. Shevock,
Living together well involves gazing into another’s eyes and allowing another’s voice to touch our ears. This experience is traditionally called conviviality (Bates and Shevock 2020; Illich 1973; Shevock and Holster 2025; Shorner-Johnson, Gonzalez & Shevock 2023). Ivan Illich first defined conviviality within the context of technological tools being used in the 1970s. Conviviality means more than mere friendliness. It is a condition in which individuals and communities are self-directed, agentic, sustainable, and within which people live well together. What happens when we use this framework to understand care in general; and social media and artificial intelligence in specific? My published research has explored this topic since 2020.
My work on conviviality has been conducted with others—I have no solo conviviality publications as of August 2026—this is because conviviality, living well together, entangles others by necessity. This is not because I fail to have distinctive thoughts on the topic, but because conviviality is relationality. If conviviality engages folk in systems of collaboration without them being subordinated to a tool, ideology, or system, then human relationships deepen the possibility for correctly interpreting conviviality, especially within individual-focused scholarly structures. Collaboration on these projects certainly did not make my work more efficient. The opposite is true, really.
In my first paper, analyzing social media through a lens of convivial tools with Vincent Bates (Bates and Shevock 2020), we analyze social media as good when it expands human abilities, and bad when it limits agency and community interrelationships. Does social media manufacture needs or satisfy us through enoughness? Social media is not inherently emancipatory or vicious. Teachers and learners can use many social media tools well, but only if they remain aware of its possible powers and challenges. We recommend recommoning as a promising path toward greater conviviality— creating new commons where music and life bonds can be shaped, commons which lie beyond industrial and economic models, manufactured needs, and profit incentives.
In a 2023 handbook chapter, Kevin Shorner-Johnson, Martha Gonzalez and I use a convivial model (convivencias) to examine the idea of care. In educational settings we reject care as unidirectional. Even care as a more dyadic relationship fails to meet standards of convivencias. Such altruistic conceptions of care have historically been the foundation of systems of oppression, colonization, and domination. Conviviality transforms care from a state where one person cares for another into a reciprocal, community relationship. We conceptualize care as a circle. People participate in a shared community with shared musical practices. Every person living in such a reciprocal community is a carer and cared-for. At all moments from birth to death. Separate from community, individual autonomy is naïve and collapses into oppression of others, colonization of cultures, and domination of non-human lifeforms. The convivial web of life ties us to the more-than-human world of non-human animals, plantlife, and places. Convivencias, then, offers a pathway toward re-membering us in our local communities. This paper helped me recognize how conviviality, living with, is lived.
In 2025, Jacob Holster and I applied our model of conviviality to artificial intelligence adoption. Community, waste, dependability, repairability, and especially agency are centered. Agency remains the decisive issue. Convenience is not synonymous with conviviality—rather when choosing to adopt or reject AI, we must ask how it fosters or displaces deep think, decision-making, and action. The ecological cost also becomes part of the adoption process—waste is not hidden as has too often happened in ed tech discourse. Adoption and rejection are both viable choices, or else both adoption and rejection collapse into force. We demonstrated our framework through lived use to help readers understand a convivial model.
If conviviality points people toward cultivating relationships that are close enough to sense, then our ideals, theories, and tools can be scrutinized as convivial or anti-convivial. My principal contribution has been transforming Illich’s idea of conviviality, a profound and multifaceted critical theory, into a practical, usable, and repairable model centered on human agency, community, intergenerational ways of knowing, respect for non-human animals, and living sustainably within a bioregion. Conviviality is not merely a model for adopting technological tools or for critiquing ideologies, but is the condition for relationality—living well together without surrendering agency.
References
Bates, Vincent C., & Daniel J. Shevock. “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Social Media in Music Education.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley and Kari K. Veblen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 619-644.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Marion Boyars, 1973).
Shevock, Daniel J and Jacob D. Holster “The Model for Convivial Tools Applied to ChatGPT.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24, no. 3 (June 2025): 165-201. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.3.165
Shorner-Johnson, Kevin, Martha Gonzalez & Daniel J. Shevock “Convivencias and a Web of Care.” In The Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education, edited by Karin S. Hendricks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 69-78.
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leafinthesoil.jpg
Conviviality is Relationality, by Daniel J. Shevock,
Living together well involves gazing into another’s eyes and allowing another’s voice to touch our ears. This experience is traditionally called conviviality (Bates and Shevock 2020; Illich 1973; Shevock and Holster 2025; Shorner-Johnson, Gonzalez & Shevock 2023). Ivan Illich first defined conviviality within the context of technological tools being used in the 1970s. Conviviality means more than mere friendliness. It is a condition in which individuals and communities are self-directed, agentic, sustainable, and within which people live well together. What happens when we use this framework to understand care in general; and social media and artificial intelligence in specific? My published research has explored this topic since 2020.
My work on conviviality has been conducted with others—I have no solo conviviality publications as of August 2026—this is because conviviality, living well together, entangles others by necessity. This is not because I fail to have distinctive thoughts on the topic, but because conviviality is relationality. If conviviality engages folk in systems of collaboration without them being subordinated to a tool, ideology, or system, then human relationships deepen the possibility for correctly interpreting conviviality, especially within individual-focused scholarly structures. Collaboration on these projects certainly did not make my work more efficient. The opposite is true, really.
In my first paper, analyzing social media through a lens of convivial tools with Vincent Bates (Bates and Shevock 2020), we analyze social media as good when it expands human abilities, and bad when it limits agency and community interrelationships. Does social media manufacture needs or satisfy us through enoughness? Social media is not inherently emancipatory or vicious. Teachers and learners can use many social media tools well, but only if they remain aware of its possible powers and challenges. We recommend recommoning as a promising path toward greater conviviality— creating new commons where music and life bonds can be shaped, commons which lie beyond industrial and economic models, manufactured needs, and profit incentives.
In a 2023 handbook chapter, Kevin Shorner-Johnson, Martha Gonzalez and I use a convivial model (convivencias) to examine the idea of care. In educational settings we reject care as unidirectional. Even care as a more dyadic relationship fails to meet standards of convivencias. Such altruistic conceptions of care have historically been the foundation of systems of oppression, colonization, and domination. Conviviality transforms care from a state where one person cares for another into a reciprocal, community relationship. We conceptualize care as a circle. People participate in a shared community with shared musical practices. Every person living in such a reciprocal community is a carer and cared-for. At all moments from birth to death. Separate from community, individual autonomy is naïve and collapses into oppression of others, colonization of cultures, and domination of non-human lifeforms. The convivial web of life ties us to the more-than-human world of non-human animals, plantlife, and places. Convivencias, then, offers a pathway toward re-membering us in our local communities. This paper helped me recognize how conviviality, living with, is lived.
In 2025, Jacob Holster and I applied our model of conviviality to artificial intelligence adoption. Community, waste, dependability, repairability, and especially agency are centered. Agency remains the decisive issue. Convenience is not synonymous with conviviality—rather when choosing to adopt or reject AI, we must ask how it fosters or displaces deep think, decision-making, and action. The ecological cost also becomes part of the adoption process—waste is not hidden as has too often happened in ed tech discourse. Adoption and rejection are both viable choices, or else both adoption and rejection collapse into force. We demonstrated our framework through lived use to help readers understand a convivial model.
If conviviality points people toward cultivating relationships that are close enough to sense, then our ideals, theories, and tools can be scrutinized as convivial or anti-convivial. My principal contribution has been transforming Illich’s idea of conviviality, a profound and multifaceted critical theory, into a practical, usable, and repairable model centered on human agency, community, intergenerational ways of knowing, respect for non-human animals, and living sustainably within a bioregion. Conviviality is not merely a model for adopting technological tools or for critiquing ideologies, but is the condition for relationality—living well together without surrendering agency.
References
Bates, Vincent C., & Daniel J. Shevock. “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Social Media in Music Education.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley and Kari K. Veblen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 619-644.
Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Marion Boyars, 1973).
Shevock, Daniel J and Jacob D. Holster “The Model for Convivial Tools Applied to ChatGPT.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 24, no. 3 (June 2025): 165-201. https://doi.org/10.22176/act24.3.165
Shorner-Johnson, Kevin, Martha Gonzalez & Daniel J. Shevock “Convivencias and a Web of Care.” In The Oxford Handbook of Care in Music Education, edited by Karin S. Hendricks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), 69-78.
Link to image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leafinthesoil.jpg
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