Commonings

What could a school look like that seeks to make both learning and unlearning a common interrelated practice? How can a space be built around care, refuge, implication and vulnerability, negotiating positions and responsibilities? How can privileges and habits of hierarchy be challenged, as well as authorship, productivity and competition? And how could such a school take place inside an institution and carve space for informal, convivial, horizontal modes of participation within it, allowing for gaps, mistakes and areas left open. In the twelve editions of the New Alphabet School, thinking of knowledge as part of the commons, the roles of curators and audience blurred and reverted in order to co-create shared space for networked knowledge. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney suggest in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, “one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can.” The New Alphabet School sought to reflect on such a suggestion via fugitive encounters and instances of study as a coming and doing together. In this final edition on COMMONINGS, the invitation is to carry on questions and incomplete dialogues, sharing practices from the previous editions, the multiple locations, and the different perspectives that emerged in the last three and a half years. By convening again, we will explore together what these practices might institute, and how they might form an ephemeral school of commonings.