GCAS-Jəhān is a collaborative international educational programme that brings together scholars, artists, organizers, and researchers, and GCAS College Dublin. All its offerings entail live online, hybrid, and in-person learning and research communities.
GCAS-Jəhān is an egalitarian international platform for transdisciplinary, collaborative, and sustainable practices of knowing, being, and making. We host and encourage the creation of shared knowledges anchored in, responding to, and serving mutualities across the Global South understood not as a fixed geographical location, but as the moving subaltern/ized positionalities of social actors and institutions in the system of global economic and political power, as well as a set of existential, epistemic, and material conditions common to the victims of various configurations of capitalism and colonialism.
Jəhān (Persian: جهان, Urdu: جہاں, Bengali: জাহান) is a word of Persian origin that initial meant “worldly creatures” but then came to mean “world” or “universe.” In signalling worlds, universes, and the wherever, the word Jəhān imagines places and belongings not yet exhausted or brutalized by nation, nation-state, and other fixations of colonial and capitalist modernity. As a decentred node of Global Centre for Advanced Studies in Dublin, GCAS-Jəhān’s locus is the fugal and itinerant spaces that summon new worlds, some of which have been withheld from us by precisely those institutions we had trusted to do otherwise. Jəhān, thus, rolls together the nominal, the conjunctive, and the adverbial — an invitation in the spirit of anticolonial and antifascist (and what in these times feels like an apocalyptic) hospitality, foundational and aspirational to Hic Rosa Collective since 2015, harboring what is unsettled and insurgent in our time, as a locus for building together alongside existing structures.
To this end, GCAS-Jəhān contributes to GCAS’s transformative educational and social mission by focusing on the transdisciplinary, diasporic, and ecumenical study of capital, colony, and place as inseparable and enduring modes of production of experience, knowledge, and reality. It extends the GCAS model of accessible, debt-free, cooperative education into a variety of autonomous models for collaborative study and research, intellectual practice, and cultural production. Its courses and programmes will contribute to GCAS certificate programmes, GCAS degree programs, credits required for degree programs outside GCAS, and to an egalitarian global ecosystem of consensually shared knowledges with independent collectives and institutions across the Global South.
GCAS-Jəhān’s signature Nəhj curriculum informs degree and non-degree pursuits for virtual, hybrid, and low-residency learners at the bachelor’s, post-baccalaureate, certificate, continuing education, and master’s levels, as well as special programmes in internationalist political education for young people ages 15 to 21.
Each configuration imagines new entwinements and accountabilities beyond the fabled divides of novice/expert, theory/practice, activist/intellectual, and teacher/scholar, and across ages, stages, institutions, disciplines, and geographies.
GCAS-Jəhān’s institutionality and pedagogy invoke the abundance of an educational commons in response to an austere and neo-fascist necropolitics. A democracy of experiences and a democracy of inquiry are both integral to such abundance. They speak to an education that runs counter to the murderous efficiencies of racial capitalism, liberalism, patriarchy, and fascism that cohere in the ongoing colonial order and its preferred modes of knowledge production.