Praktik Spasial

Remote education was originally invented to overcome distance, to make learning accessible to those who could not converge in centralized campuses. Social isolation and the fear of contagion today is forcing the use of similar methods to continue learning processes while instituting distance, severing the chains of viral transmission. Closed in at home, the image of the early Open University appears in the reflection of our screens, with its famous charter playing on an imaginary radio:...

Ralf and Robert arrive to collect me from my hotel on a snowy Vienna morning to drive to the wartime labor camp at Mauthausen. I've been invited by the Austrian Ministry of the Interior to consider whether the site can be a museum of itself, and whether that performance of itself is the best way in which it can become a pedagogical reality. I am ambivalent about the coming experience, not wanting to get caught up in a discussion that demands having a clear and unambiguous position that...

I began writing this essay weeks before I left South Africa in November 2019 for good; picked it up again a week after my arrival in New York City and finished it in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced the issue of “educational space” onto the agenda in ways no one could have predicted. It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. —Lewis Carroll 1 Yesteryear The start of the new academic year is always fraught,...

It is for the sake of the present and of the future that they are willing to die. —Frantz Fanon 1 But if we rediscover time beneath the subject, and if we relate to the paradox of time those of the body, the world, the thing, and others, we shall understand that beyond these there is nothing to understand. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty 2 As institutions prepare for economies of the future there is an increased interest in identifying new developmental pathways by collecting...

The beginning of the twentieth century in England saw an increase in social welfare and educational reforms, the birth of the Garden City movement, and the experimental Open Air School movement. These efforts were triggered by the problems of mass urbanization and the overcrowded, poor living conditions in the industrial towns and suburbs of the North and across the country. This time also saw a fresh approach towards education, which would reshape traditional forms of education based...

The other day, Matt Mullenweg (chief executive of Automatic, which owns the WorldPress blogging platform) stated: “This is not how I imagined envisioned the distributed work revolution taking hold.” 1 Perhaps, but he is not complaining either! In fact, in the age of COVID-19, educators now have to grapple with the distinct possibility that the idea of “distributed work” is being taken as the model for “distributed learning.” This shift comes, of course, on the coattails of the...

In the United Kingdom, the Education Act of 1944 introduced secondary schooling for all children in government funded education, with a system of grammar, technical grammar, and “secondary modern” schools, for which pupils were selected by an intelligence test. The problem for Nottinghamshire was a shortage of grammar and technical schools: there were none outside of the county’s two main industrial centers, Nottingham and Mansfield in the western half of the county. 1 After 1945, the...

The April 1968 issue of the American magazine Progressive Architecture and the May 1968 issue of the UK Architectural Design journal both featured a thematic focus on matters regarding education and architecture. “The School Scene: Change and More Change” was Progressive Architecture ’s cover claim, whereas AD asked: “What about Learning?” The cover illustrations of both magazines suggested a technological overhaul of the traditional classroom, with images of computers cut and pasted...

The late 1960s saw the birth of two radical ideas in the fields of education and environment. In education, the deschooling movement began with a seminar in Mexico entitled “Alternatives in Education.” For the scholars involved, schooling was an institution that perpetrated an unjust social order through a “hidden curriculum” and which had to be changed in order to achieve social justice. 1 As a result of their meetings, two years later, Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society , where he...

Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single center, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilizes and moves nothing. –Gilles Deleuze 1 The state of India recently introduced a number of divisive and controversial legislative acts, like the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Population Register (NPR), and a proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC)....

Architectures of Education is a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Kingston University, and e-flux Architecture, and a cross-publication with The Contemporary Journal .​ Drawing on a three-day public program at Nottingham Contemporary on November 7–9, 2019, the series features contributions by Ramon Amaro, Aoife Donnelly and Kristin Trommler, Gudskul, Elain Harwood, Tom Holert, Lesley Lokko, Sol Perez-Martinez, Irit Rogoff, Santhosh S., and more. Learning has long been at...