COVID shows humans need interaction, cooperation and a life in nature. This course on "cultural commons" will skill you up
Commoning and commons-practice - the culture where communities create or establish shared and common assets, for whose flourishing and development they are directly responsible - is a big part of our thinking at A/UK (as any archive search will attest).
Under its umbrella a fascinating range of practices - economic and cultural, technological and traditional - swarm and mingle: connecting hackers to indigenous peoples, creative cooperators to natural resource managers.
So we were very interested to hear about an educational course recommencing this September, in our back yard - at London Metropolitan University, virtually and face-to-face - which takes students through commons practice, as it applies to arts and culture.
Here’s the blurb:
Practice development for creating new commons projects
We have developed a suite of courses at London Metropolitan University to support cultural (art & architecture), urban, and design practices. This is to innovatively rethink, expand and/or redefine design and cultural practice through the lens of the commons.
Covid-19 demonstrated to the world our need for social interaction, cooperation and human/environmental connection. Such relations are the bricks and mortar of commoning practice and commons thinking.
The courses are ideal if you are critical of current inequalities produced by neoliberalism—be it within companies and institutions that shape our lives, or how our cities are being shaped.
These courses being practice-based address inequalities and extraction through developing new innovative, socially ethical, and applied models, found in art, politics, sociology, urbanism, and architecture, to name a few disciplines.
If a practice is fully dependent on neoliberalism they become part of it. In these courses, we start to unpick those relations and see how to either reduce such involvement that unconsciously plays a role of support. Or to find systems for practices to sit in its margins (whilst financially sustaining themselves).
The models are based on current developments in peer production, common good economy, and design methods of co-design and collaboration, power relations, and modes of resistance.
These courses are predominantly practice and project-based with an injection of theory to offer criticality to the work produced.
WHO ARE THEY FOR?
An existing cultural practitioner who wants to critically reflect on their practice and analyse where to go next using the Commons as a tool for analysis or as a way to frame a new practice.
An artist, designer, architect, or urban designer who wants to articulate a social, ethical, and Commons-based practice that is financially sustainable.
An employee in an institution or organisation who wants to reflect on their role. Either to gain more agency, to have more impact, or to develop a new socially responsible and Commons-based area within the institution or organisation.
More here. We understand there are places left in the course, which has various tiered levels, which you can apply for here (final deadline September 25th, 2020).
Below is a video from the course leader, Torange Khonsari, showing aspects of the MA course: