A deschooled environment for building convivial cultures
Applications are now being accepted for Research Fellows to join the next year of The After School, an international learning community organized by the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR). The program will begin September 28, 2024, and end on June 8, 2025, with two in-person residencies, November 5–14, 2024, and March 27–April 5, 2025. An Information session will be held via Zoom on August 24, 2024 at 10am EST. Register for the Information session here. The application deadline is August 30, 2024. Apply to The After School here.
The After School is a deschooled educational space, an arts, design, and research community of globally diverse experiences and methods for ways of knowing and doing. It is founded on the creative power of difference—without hierarchy— as essential to effectively challenging the many forms of exploitation, extraction, and violence. The After School is an experiment in de-centered translocality that creates enduring links between people, places, and communities world-wide through work that proposes new forms of solidarity and care.
Ivan Illich’s 1971 book Deschooling Society makes a powerful argument for forms of teaching and learning outside of and in opposition to compulsory schooling. Schooling, he writes, is a process that produces dependency on exploitative social forms by de-skilling people. The book critiques the idea that institutions are the only source of credible knowledge, and instead explains how they actively suppress the many forms of knowledge already present in the lives and experience of people and communities.
What lies beyond “School”? The After School is self-organized, convivial, and collaborative, inflected by the experience and concerns of each participant and dedicated to a common practice of equitable global diversity and dialogue. The After School is structured by two in-person research residencies and monthly online meetings. The first residency, in Kenya, November 5–14, 2024, is co-organized with Neo Sinoxolo Musangi and the Center for the Arts, Tafaria Foundation. The second, co-organized with Pelin Tan, will be held at Theira Commune, Tire, Turkey, March 27–April 5, 2025. Between these two intensive events, there are monthly online Common Assemblies, bringing together all participants; small research group meetings; individual sessions; and self-organized regional meetings. Visiting artists, activists, designers, and researchers, as well as collectives and organizations, join throughout, providing unique opportunities to engage, constructively challenge, and create alongside a truly global community with a wide array of perspectives and experiences. The results include collaborative research projects, films, soundscapes, gardens, performances, structures, publications, workshops, and exhibitions that reflect an overall dialogical process across localities while addressing the complexities of power, place, and resources. The process creates enduring social infrastructures.
The After School is facilitated by CAD+SR’s Senior Researchers: Dalida María Benfield, Christopher Bratton, Luigi Coppola, Ou Ning, Bruno Moreschi, Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, and Pelin Tan. Each brings a constellation of collaborators, knowledge, geographies, and practices. They provide both formal and informal engagement and mentoring. The community is also joined by distinguished Visiting Artists and Faculty Fellows, including artist Anita Kavochy, Maasai Mbili collective; writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor; and Renan Laru-an, Artistic Director, SAVVY Contemporary.
The After School is simultaneously structured and informal with ample space for spontaneity and discovery. It builds on CAD+SR’s international research communities, including the first session of The After School (ongoing through November 2024, online & Theira Commune, Tire, Turkey & Tafaria Foundation, Ndaragwa, Kenya); Technologies of Critical Conscientization, or Con/Crit/Tec (Casa do Povo, São Paulo, Brazil, 2023); Un-Writing Nature I & II (Kirinyaga District, Kenya, 2020 & Villa Pianciani, Spoleto, Italy, 2023); Black Planetary Futures (online & Johannesburg, South Africa & Dak’Art, Senegal, 2019–2022); Cosmological Gardens, Encuentros I-IV (online & Villa Pianciani, Spoleto, Italy, 2019–2022); De/Archive East Africa (Ongata Rongai, Kenya, 2020); Affecting Technologies, Machining Intelligences (University of São Paulo, Brazil, 2020); and Indigenous Planetary Ways of Knowing (Mérida, Mexico, 2019).
Planetary in mission, outlook, and scope, untethered to a fixed location, CAD+SR is a non-profit organization that convenes, supports, and collaborates with creative thinkers in imagining—and enacting—responses to urgent challenges.
