This session brings together friends affiliated with the Enlivened Cooperative who have been engaging in what we have been referring to as cosmopolitical learning. This refers to the practice of learning with, in between, across and beyond distinct ontologies, especially alongside indigenous teachers and in/from place. Cosmopolitics, first coined by philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (2005), is a concept intended as an antidote, a slowing down, to the practices and processes of the ontological commitments characteristic of modernity. This opens the possibility of engaging with the cosmos as not a predetermined entity already named and described according to particular disciplinary methods and epistemologies, but rather as messy, plural and becoming, open to other ways of knowing and being in relationship with. At the same, cosmopolitics brings into focus how non-human actors, such as mountains, forests, rivers and others are also subjects and political beings who ought to be included into the constitutional arrangements of how we order our world.
In this seminar we share experiences from Mexico, Peru, Hawai’i, New Zealand and the US that engage with these practices and the kinds of learning that has emerged from participants.
Further, the seminar is an opportunity to collectively reflect on what this kind of work looks like in the contexts and practices that you engage with and how we might support each other in this kind of work.
| Webinar date | 2022/11/16 |
|---|---|
| Topics | Commons, Education, Social change |
| Participants | Udi Mandel, Gerardo Lopez-Amaro, Kelly Teamey, Rosemary Logan |
A paper engaging with some of these themes was published by 3 of us in a recent volume of Educação & Realidade on ‘Within or Beyond the University? Experiences of alternative higher education’. This can be freely accessed here: https://www.scielo.br/j/edreal/a/J5GpZcZm5YwCnHhYpDtcrRc/?lang=en.
The Enlivened Cooperative is a worker-owned, not-for-profit, eco-social learning organization, reimagining learning in support of people, grassroots communities and organizations with tools, practices and sensibilities to co-construct inter-cultural and ecological worlds. https://www.enlivenedcooperative.org.