We live in perilous times. Challenges face us at a global level that can seem too challenging and complex to address. They have correlates and consequences at the local and personal level that can sap our energy to imagine the world differently.
And yet that is what we have to do: imagine that our society can be different: inclusive, participatory, democratic, based on principles of mutual aid and shared responsibility. This requires engaging in radically alternative direct actions in the present, but also unlearning some of the principles and practices we take for granted.
In this project we focus on a wide range of interdisciplinary personal and collective imaginative actions.
We want to do three things:
To think with the crises and opportunities that face us. To consider how we got here, how we live now and what future we are enacting.
To act here and now. What we do and how we live each day builds that future and puts that thinking and imagination into action.
To connect to a wider community with whom to share that thinking, doing and unlearning.
The podcasts
The eighth podcast features Efe Cengiz, a PhD student from Turkey who is doing his doctoral research at the University of Groningen. His doctoral research is focused on olive cultivation, agriculture in the face of climate change and environmental challenges, and giving a voice to the human as well as more-than-human actors in a local context. Efe shares his fascinating views on how different types of knowledge are produced in local contexts, and how we can listen more carefully to what they have to say. The podcast is linked here.
The seventh podcast features an interview with Iarina Tava, an architect working in Romania in a interdisciplinary way. We discuss how unlearning relates to the way she works and particularly focus on a project called Voice Your Place that she undertook with high school students in her home town. The podcast is linked here.
The sixth podcast features an interview with Yvonne Feijten, an artisan specialising in alternative printing techniques and photography based in Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. We discuss her approach to art and craft and how unlearning informs her teaching. The podcast is linked here.
The fifth podcast features an interview with Destiny Bunprakong and Silvana Rhoads, both student-teachers in the Bachelor of International Teacher Education for Primary Schools at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. We discuss their vision for a school informed by the principles of mutual aid and ecology. The podcast is linked here.
The fourth podcast features an interview with Katerin Theys, a fashion designer, clothes maker and interior architect based in Hong Kong and Belgium. We discuss how fashion can be done differently and her process from designing, to working with small scale ateliers to selling. The podcast is linked here.
The third podcast features an interview with Jan-Roelof Bathoorn, a professional accordionist and singer who lives in the ‘Oude Rooms Katholieke Ziekenhuis’ (also known as the ORKZ), a co-operative housing project in Groningen in the north of the Netherlands. We discuss the value of the idea of unlearning in the context of music and community space for living and the arts. The podcast is linked here.
The second podcast features an interview with Thais Hvid. Thais is a professional dance and movement coach and choreographer. We discuss the application and elucidation of the idea of unlearning in the context of dance and movement, the role of the teacher and draw out ideas applicable to education and life more broadly. The podcast is linked here.
The first podcast is a discussion about the ways the ethos of punk as a movement informs Punk Ethnography and unlearning. The podcast is linked here.
Punk Ethnography 