‘Techniques for Living Otherwise’: Naming, Composing and Instituting Otherwise

Reading across genealogies of Institutional Pedagogy developed by the Ecole Moderne, movement their informants in post-revolutionary Soviet education and other radical education histories, including Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the popular pedagogies of the Latin Amer-ica Alforja Network, this text looks at three ‘techniques for living otherwise’ that emerge around three different modes of grounding world and movement - making techniques. The first is that of NAMING. The second is that of COMPOSING. The third is that of INSTITUTING. Across these three modalities I highlight the largely under-examined role of social production in these radical education histories in their importance to understanding the politics they shape

Thinking with Conditions: from Public Programming to Radical Pedagogy in and Beyond Contemporary Art

Thinking With Conditions: From Public Programming To Radical Pedagogy In And Beyond Contemporary Art is a study of the contradictions and possibilities of public programming. Charting a rise in discursive events in galleries since the 1990s, (called public programming), the thesis analyses the claims made for these events as moments in which to create alternative enactments of the public sphere and poses alternatives. The thesis posits that in our current moment such claims are overshadowed by a mode of post-Fordist production that propels individual, virtuosic and communicative performances, regularly detaching a political kind of speech from meaningful political action. I argue that in this tendency, described by Paulo Virno as ‘publicness without a sphere’ public programming joins a suite of other ‘public’ practices that enact a public pedagogy in which its agents learn to detach passionate and politicised speech from practices in their life worlds. I call this tendency thinking without conditions. Part I of the thesis examines instances of thinking without conditions in public programming in the arts, and in fields like Education and the Law. Drawing from the work of Paulo Freire, archives of popular education in Latin America and genealogies of Institutional Pedagogy in France, Part II of the thesis argues for thinking with conditions, through radical pedagogy practices that more meaningfully connect what is said and what can be acted upon. Each chapter is structured around anecdotes drawn from experience working in the fields of public programming through which I have attempted to chart the intersection of micro and macro political concerns as they manifest in everyday working practices. Throughout the thesis I argue that practices of organisation — though often eclipsed by more heroic narratives and thematics in public programmes – are crucial to understanding how radical change can and does take place

How do the Life Stories of Non-Traditional Students Impact Their Educational Journeys

The research question highlights the importance of personal narrative and explores the notion that reframing one’s story can have a strong impact on future success. The author discusses research pertaining to disconnected learners and examines the way in which personal stories influence classroom motivation. The data collection process takes an autobiographical approach as three non-traditional students share their educational life histories. Students’ stories are comprehensively explored through interviews, a review of student records, and observations. Each documented educational journey emphasizes the significance of individual stories and the importance of acknowledging the unique struggles faced by non-traditional students

Speculating on Student Debt

Far from being a right, British higher education in the age of top-up fees is a commodity with a hefty price tag attached. For most students, it offers a basic schooling in debt and recasts learning as a down-payment on a dubious future

Azamba publics: containment, care and curating in the “expanded private sphere”

The lack of space, movement and even breath afforded to many communities cuts across seemingly mobile life trajectories, constraining and constricting even (and often especially) the movement of people across and within transnational borders. How do arts organisations and projects explicitly work against the violence of these forms of constraint? Where liberal models of the public sphere have underpinned many ideas of art in public space—particularly those based in the notions of appearance and the “general” public—it is from situated praxes originating from what Stahl and Stoecker have described as the “expanded private sphere” that poignant lessons can be learned of a community and curatorial practice dedicated to solidarity and support. In this paper, we elaborate a notion of art in public that refuses a division from the “private”, without straying unproblematically into the terrain of the personal or exploitative economies of care. We draw from our collaborative experiences in using creative strategies for countering the narrative containment of refugee groups in the face of UK media racism through the project Conflict, Memory, Displacement as well as the limitations we encountered. Using the concept of Azamba—a Malawan practice of community care and midwifery recently adopted by the women’s group Global Sistaz United in Nottingham, UK—we further elaborate how practices and narrations of care and community support might reconfigure our relation to ideas of art, curating and publics

Organizing the precarious: Autonomous work, real democracy and ecological precarity

In 2008, just as the movement of the precarious seemed to be winning political battle after political battle, the fight against precarization suddenly dwindled. The cycle of struggles of the precarious that began in 2000 had come to an end. Ironically this was also the moment that precarity as a concept became widely known in popular opinion, media commentary and academia. This paper focuses on the movement of the precarious from its inception in the early 2000s to its decline in 2008 and its reappearance in response to the economic crisis through the widespread mobilizations for “real democracy” between 2008 and 2014. Drawing from our experience as participants in the movement of the precarious, and theoretical discussions that have shaped the politics of the movement, the paper adopts a retrospective approach to investigate the metamorphoses of a consciousness of precarity and of the underlying organizing practices that lead to its demise and its subsequent incarnations. It reconstructs precarity as theory in action than existed only through the organizational ontologies of the movement of the precarious

Percussion Ensemble

KSU School of Music presents Percussion Ensemble.https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/musicprograms/1322/thumbnail.jp