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11 Dec 2018
Pedagogical turns in practice

This Urgent Pedagogies seminar at IASPIS focused on the formation of democratic and pluralistic environments where participants can learn freely, honestly and enthusiastically, not confined within the traditional walls of academia, but cutting across different forms of knowledge, integrating aspects of life and dialogue with the larger community.

Under the Mango Tree, School of Narrative Dance, Kassel, documenta 14. Photo: Sepake Angiama

Education is once again at the forefront of the political struggle for justice and equality and here artists and architects play an important role in developing new forms of knowledge production. In the last years the emergence of new schools, educational programs, self-organised learning environments and radical reforms within formal educational institutions have tried to acknowledge different forms of knowledge production grounded in society and able to challenge the dominant model of a globalized western education. This open seminar at Iaspis has a focus on the formation of democratic and pluralistic environments where participants can learn freely, honestly and enthusiastically, not confined within the traditional walls of academia, but which cut across different forms of knowledge, integrating aspects of life and dialogue with the larger community. The goal is to explore the processes by which critical learning and egalitarian environments can emerge and influence educational institutions, while seeking a manner of critical intervention for the constitution and strengthening of civic spaces in contemporary realities.

We will ask ourselves, which role does the university have in the greater transformation of society? How could the knowledge that is produced inside its walls be relevant, useful for students that live in marginalized communities? What kinds of structures or institutions are required for the accommodation of interests and subjects born from the interaction between students, teachers and the broader social context? How can the attention of educational institutions move from the production of knowledge – based on information and skills – to processes of learning – based on shifts in perception, critical approaches, visions and governing principles? And how to reconcile theory with action, and combine a rigorous understanding of the problems with pragmatic and effective urban interventions?

Participants included Sepake Angiama, Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti and the event was organised by IASPIS together with the postmaster course Decolonizing Architecture: displacement, migration and colonial heritage at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.

Participants
Sepake Angiama

is an educator and curator with an interest in the discursive and social framework that has led her to work with artists, architects, designers and choreographers who like to disrupt the social sphere. She’s interested in how these practices have sought to develop pedagogical initiatives such as schools and libraries placed outside of the traditional models of education, and how these also can shape or form communities. In 2017 she brought together a number of practices from different parts of the world to share their methodologies and approaches within a gathering, Under the Mango Tree. Sepake will present her interest in small-scale practices that seek to develop pedagogical forms of practice.

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti

is an architect, lecturer and researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Since 2018 she has been teaching the course Decolonizing Architecture. Her current research explores invisibility as a critical strategy, subjectivity and spatial category in the ongoing research project: Hyper-visible Invisibility: Tracing the Politics, Poetics and Affects of the Unseen, published in The Field Journal: Becoming a Feminist Architect (2017). And in the collaborative artistic research project Spaces of Care Disobedience and Desire: Tactics of Minority Space-Making, initiated together with Rado Ištok and Natalia Rebelo at the Royal Academy of Art.

Resources
EDITED BY
Magnus Ericson
LAST UPDATED
2021-02-01
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