<nettime> summit -- non aligned initiatives in education culture

[florian schneider <fls@kein.org>]

Dear nettimers!

Two weeks before this years G-8 meeting in Heiligendamm near Rostock
various projects, initiatives and protagonists from the fields of art,
culture and political activism are going to gather in Berlin for
SUMMIT -- Non Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture.

SUMMIT is a proposal to question and to change some of the fundamental
terms of the debate around education, knowledge production and
information society.

SUMMIT seeks to bring together various approaches from different
genres and calls to come forth and unalign. Unalign from both, the
tendencies of bureaucratization and privatization of knowledge and
education. The four-day event focusses on four thematic tracks:
"Knowledge and Migrancy", "Self-authorization, -organization,
-valorization", "Creative Practices" and "Education unrealized and
ongoing".


SUMMIT -- Non Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture

May 24 to 28, 2007, Berlin (DE)
http://summit.kein.org

The debates around education are shifting. In Europe, questions of
coordinated systems with comparable outcomes seem to dominate the
concerned discussion around the forthcoming "Bologna" accord. While
much critical opposition focuses on the loss of local traditions and
fears of global homogenization -- both sets of responses serve only to
fetishize knowledge within a commodity economy of education.

In actuality numerous non-aligned initiatives are converging around
"education", recognizing that it is equally a platform for cultural
actualisation and self organization. Within self organised educational
forums that range from free academies, to exhibitions as educational
modes to ad-hoc initiatives within social, political and economic
organisations, it is becoming clear that beyond knowledge transfer,
education is one of our most important tools for the transformation of
subjects towards a participatory mode. Equally many initiatives to
articulate contemporary subjects and forge new methods, to see
education as itself a creative cultural practice, are taking place
within established and recognised institutions of higher learning.
While these two efforts might be perceived as separate due to their
institutional and structural status, they share a desire to reclaim
education for present needs.

The crisis in education offers us potential modes of critical
engagement: drawing on activist practices and processes of
participation which circulate in the wider culture, it allows us to
claim the power to shape and define the terms of the debate. It is
clear from the many exhibition, art practice and research projects
which have recently converged on the notion of 'education', that there
is much potential for seeing it as far more than the transmission of
knowledge within dedicated institutions.

SUMMIT is a proposal to change the terms of the debate away from a
purely bureaucratic engagement with quantitative and administrative
demands and from the ongoing tendency to privatize knowledge as
socalled "intellectual property". Instead of concerns with its purely
organisational dimensions we would hope to steer it towards some of
the important questions faced by our cultures today:

KNOWLEDGE AND MIGRANCY:

How does migration affect canonised knowledge? Can we conceive of a
non-linear projection of learning? Whom do notions of fluidity and
precarity serve? How do emergent subjectivities, produced out of
current mobilities, produce newly situate knowledges?

SELF-ORGANIZATION, -AUTHORIZATION, -VALORIZATION:

What are the gestures of "un"-organizing education? If to define was
to own, where do we encounter emergent possibilities of mutuality and
collaboration within education? How can we envision new configurations
of multiple ownership of knowledge? Is self-organization a mode of
education beyond the patterns of identification?

CREATIVE PRACTICES:

The model of education has become central to a range of creative
artistic practices and to a renewed interest in radical pedagogy. As a
mode of thinking an alternative to the immense dominance of art as
commodity and display as spectacle, education as a creative practice
that involves process, experimentation, fallibility and potentiality
by definition, offers a non-conflictual model for a rethinking of the
cultural field.

EDUCATION, UNREALIZED AND ONGOING:

There are principles within learning and teaching that extend far
beyond the years spent within the institutions of education. What
models are emerging for an understanding of both an expanded duration
of education as well as for our need to redefine what needs to be know
within a contemporary civic landscape?

We call on all those interested and engaged in the debates around
education to come forth and unalign.

SUMMIT offers the following formats:

- A public program with "keynote-lectures" by prominent thinkers,
"curated conversations" between actors in the field, and 'history
lessons' which locate previous moments of radical aspirations or
transformations in the field.

- Working groups, caucuses and concept labs: A series of meetings and
sessions on burning questions of education

- Open space: Forum for initiating proposals, highlighting practices
and making theory urgent

- Collaborative drafting of a declaration


DATES:

May 24 to 28, 2007

VENUES:

Hebbel Am Ufer (HAU), Stresemannstr. 29, 10963 Berlin
unitednationsplaza, Platz der Vereinten Nationen 14a, 10249 Berlin
bootlab, Tucholskystrasse 6, 10117 Berlin

REGISTRATION:

http://summit.kein.org
info[at]summit.kein.org

FACILITATING COMITTEE:

Kodwo Eshun, Susanne Lang, Irit Rogoff, Florian Schneider, Nicolas
Siepen, Nora Sternfeld


SUMMMIT is organized by Multitude e.V., in collaboration with
Goldsmiths College, London University and Witte de With, Rotterdam.
SUMMIT is supported by the Federal Culture Foundation, Germany.





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