Manifesto

All the work shared and discussed on this website, is underpinned by the following 

MANIFESTO:

We imagine a world in which there are alternatives; a world where humans are not turned into metrics and where plurality, imagination and speculation are celebrated.  We imagine communities, collectives, and spaces of possibilities where collaboration, participation and direct action are practised. 

We imagine the emergence of a different paradigm for researchers and practitioners, a paradigm that puts at the centre concerns with social transformation and the creation of alternative futures through imaginative actions in the present, guided by the following ten principles: 

  1. The future is provisional, contingent and plural. Alternative futures are possible and are crafted through an understanding of the past and direct actions in the present. 
  2. Alternative futures are formed in the present through practices that require imaginative and speculative thinking and acting.
  3. Education is always a political project. Education ought to be concerned with an individual commitment to the common good and living responsibly with human and non-human beings on a shared planet. 
  4. Researchers and practitioners must question and resist the capitalist and instrumental logic and create alternative approaches to contribute to a society that is underpinned by values of relationality, interconnectedness and solidarity. 
  5. Researchers and practitioners must play an active, engaged, imaginative and participatory role in society.
  6. Researchers must diversify and pluralise their approaches to research as an alternative to the evidence-everything gospel.
  7. Researchers and practitioners must engage with interdisciplinary imaginative and speculative theories, concepts and practices. They must be willing to advocate, through their practice, a world formed by more than mere empiricism. 
  8. Researchers and practitioners must engage in ontological inquiry and must make normative judgements, where thinking and acting are congruent.
  9. Anarchist organisational philosophy and a punk ethos must serve as guiding principles and practices for educators who construct alternative futures in the present. 
  10. Researchers and practitioners must embrace provisionality,  contingency, and plurality, and must be willing to reimagine any of the above principles, indeed the whole manifesto, at any time.