LAND/WATER

Summer School and Certificate Programme for Young People | 11 July – 5 Aug

Over four intensive weeks this summer (July 11-Aug 5), we will be taking up the theme LAND/WATER, with each week signaling an exploration of the following political arts and practices: witnessing, framing, sustaining, imagining.

The invitation to study is open to young people ages 9-21, with small independent cohorts formed by age and addressing the same pairing of theme and political art with different methods and projects. Interactive and engaging sessions will take place each weekday, with short breaks, and studio time for collective explorations. Each course will involve a plenary session, and experience with a field activity or project. 

A Programme in Political Arts of the Present

A programme considering community and authority.

Our approach to young people’s political education includes imagining a curriculum in the “political arts” or principled political practice in the present, such as belonging, believing, relating, witnessing, narrating, truth-telling, suffering, remembering, caring, healing, resisting, imagining, dreaming envisioning, building, questioning, troubling, leading, inspiring, speaking, listening, claims-making, communicating, connecting, collaborating, sustaining, organizing, and more. Contrary to the cynical and status-quo-preserving ideas of “ars politica” that span manipulation, diplomacy, political games, court intrigues, propaganda and such, what we call political arts denotes practices of surviival and mutualityinherent to contemporary political experience. 

Beyond the liberal and fine arts, and bringing them together in an orientation toward our political present and future, we are interested in the practices of political subjects, and their capacity for will, thought, action, relation, experience, imagination, leadership, solidarity, and worldmaking. 

This is, thus, a programme in aesthetic and political education free of the various conceits, prerequisites, and instrumentalist and technocratic qualifications that beset institutions that serve existing systems and the status quo, and the irony of programmes on leadership, engagement, and change that evade the political altogether, reducing these life activities to expertise, jargon, and tricks. 

1. An understanding of politics, political thinking, and political action that brings together the philosophical and practical questions of community and authority, the past and the future. 
2. A historical understanding of political thought and political action that allows us to challenge the prevalent isolation and anti-politics of today.
3. An engagement with questions of ethics, identity, truth, language, power as necessary to thinking about freedom and justice together.  
4. A concern with the seemingly ordinary actions of how we read, write, speak, and relate, and with what it is to think, learn, make, and act in any situation, whenever or wherever it may be, that leads us to thinking and bringing about change toward a more free and just world.
5. An emphasis on relations within spaces we occupy, and communities we build and inhabit. A focus away from possessing knowledge toward how a community recognizes something as known and meaningful. Activities of reading, studying, and working in each other’s company allow the distinctions between doing, meaning-making, and knowing, and between various kinds of physical, mental, and emotional work to collapse.
6. A connection between local problems and global understandings, that leads us to new ways of thinking about solidarity, leadership, transformation, and internationalism. 
7. An education not toward, but through equality, resisting institutionalizations of inequality and injustice. The fundamental premise of equality among learners in the educational space, with no qualifications or expertise placing one above the other, is what allows the inequalities within the wider community to become visible and able to be reflected upon. 
8. Holding together collective study, political knowledge, strategic thinking, tactical know-how, and self-reflection around social inequalities and injustices because it seeks to not replicate certain burdens of teaching and learning, presenting and spectating, evidence and ignorance, and their bearers, but to collectively own the task of building an ethos of freedom, equality, and justice that works outward from the space of education into the building of new worlds. 
9. Learning with and from activists and scholars alike, and immersion in contemporary situations of political struggle and social action.