Abstract

“Rituals, Routines & Improvisations” is a research-based project exploring the informal, often transitory, community-led educational interventions in the urban realm. Engrained in the day-to-day occurrences, often within oppressive and poorly defined peripheries, this workshop will reflect upon alternative modes of learning that forge cultural cooperation and self-governance. Drawing on individual and collective experiences, this session will support participants in mapping out spaces of learning, conviviality and solidarity. The highlighted spaces, rituals and place-based cosmologies will form an abstractive, imaginative and nurturing educational space, broadening our understanding of what education is and the diverse space where it can happen.

Session and activities

Participants are invited to do emotional mapping of spaces of learning, teaching, care and community resistance across London and beyond, drawing on their own experiences within these spaces. Alongside an OS map of London, participants will be provided scissors, pencils, tapes and other DYI materials to draw, cut out, leave comments directly on the map. Participants will also have access to a mini printer that can be connected to laptops and phones, allowing people to print images of their chosen locations, visual references, memories, associations, and activities that transpire there. We are particularly interested in precarious solidarities, improvised interventions and communal pedagogies that sit outside the institutional realms, situated in the ‘meanwhile’ fractures of the city, beyond the performative, beyond the orthodoxy,” beyond the school (!) of thought”. This can be alternative Saturday schools, local cinemas, shopping centres, chicken shops, hardware stores, or someone’s living room – spaces of refuge for different diasporas, learning hubs that allow people to process and imagine through the challenges and hostility that come with being in London and its prevailing neo-colonial conditions. To help participants formulate their thoughts, ideas and feelings, we will provide a collection of articles, teaching pamphlets, poetry extracts, manifestos and other material / visual traces from militant learning hubs, black supplementary schools, anarchist grassroots movements and other pedagogic experiments, past and current, that draw on anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, abolitionist, climate and social justice approach to curriculum building. Participants will be invited to use these materials as resources to annotate the map, cutting out letters, words, sentences and reinterpret the text in a way that is personal and relevant to them. At the end of the session, participants will be invited to collate these annotations and reflections into a collaborative manifesto.