It’s time for an education in the political arts. The Jəhān curriculum in the “political arts” or principled political practice in the present, includes arts of 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 survival and mutuality inherent 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. 

Our is a programme in aesthetic and political education that focuses on political subjects: who they are, what they know, and how they build worlds. GCAS-Jehān introduces the political arts as a frame that inherits from the historical delineations of the liberal arts and the fine arts, and re-assembles them around the present moment toward a political education (and not merely an education in politics or policy).

LAND/WATER

Ghibli and Monsoon Terms | 27 June – 5 August 2022

Over land and water, the airways are filled with electric talk. Words like control, dispute, access, privatization, and resource rights swirl around — as if the only way to engage natural forces today were through capture or possession. LAND/WATER explores the people and politics of the present through their engagements with the environments upon which they live and die. Studying and practicing the political arts of witnessing, framing, sustaining, and imagining, this year’s Young People’s Programme will explore the tactics and tools communities around the world have used to encourage their neighbors to conceive of their shared world differently.

LAND.WATER. — the 2022 theme of the Young People’s Summer Programme in Political Arts — explores different understandings of land and water, and the political arts people employ as they experience this threshold/relation/duality politically.

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 cohorts formed by age. 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.

Political Arts in Focus, 2022

Witnessing … [July 11-16]

is the political art of holding a space or time in the world for something beyond oneself. Whether witnessing a crime, a cause, a season, or another human being, witnesses become responsible for a collective moment, movement, or feeling which is not solely theirs to own. Why, when, and for whom does witnessing occur?

Framing… [July 18-23]

is the political art of organizing how things make sense together in the world. Whether providing context for a cherished family story or building the braces for a house, framers produce structures for understanding and living in a world rife with controversy and antagonism. Where can we see framing in real time? How can we seize the moment to reframe a problem or possibility around us? What kinds of frames do people and places inherit?

Sustaining… [July 25-30]

is the political art of cultivating something which, strictly speaking, does not need to exist in the world. Whether volunteering for a worthy project or maintaining the social fabric of a family or community, to sustain something fragile in a world of infinite decay and festering regrowth requires desires, commitments, and sensitivity, and care for something which simultaneously becomes a part of and in excess of oneself. What kinds of aspirations must be sustained and what kinds of aspirations are thought of as already sustainable–and are they at odds with each other?

Imagining… [August 1-6]

is the political art of crafting possibilities for what the world is and could be. Whether imagining Los Angeles without a housing crisis or a system for sharing farming tools within a rural community, imagineers claim the beautiful possibilities for a new world nestled inside the otherwise mundane activities of this one. What imaginations are needed to fight the lack of imagination in our world right now?

Faculty

Young People’s Certificate Programme: An Education in the Political Arts

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 free also from the irony of programmes on leadership, engagement, and change that evade the political altogether, reducing these life activities to expertise, jargon, and tricks. 

Jəhān’s signature formulation of the political arts reintegrates the questions of community and authority that have been expunged from the liberal arts and the fine arts.

Our alternative approach to young people’s political education includes:

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, with other arts of life that are taught to us in and outside of educational institutions. 
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. 

Tuition | 440€ per week-long course | 1600€ per 4-course term

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