Organizing Concepts

Organizing concepts name the orientations and ethos that weave together our work as a Collective; they make public what we have in common and uncommon, and give a shared theoretical grounding to the work of the Collective.

Worlding

A generative, agentic, and interspecies notion, ‘worlding’ is a term that Donna Haraway often uses and defines as ‘making worlds together’ or the co-making of worlds. Inspired by the question ‘what kinds of worlds are needed at this time of ecological crises?’, we propose that education needs to remake worlds that recognise that: 

·   we (humans) are part of the environment, not separate from it, and like all other beings are vulnerable within it;  

·   we are not the only makers and shapers of our ‘one world’, rather, multiple worlds are made and remade with multiple non-human others; 

·   we have a lot to learn from noticing what is already going on in the worlds around us; 

·   we inherit worlds already damaged in the name of human progress and development, e.g. by colonisation and extractive capitalism;  

·   we share a responsibility to recuperate these damaged worlds to ensure that they can sustain life for future generations.  

Commoning

Commoning pedagogies do the work of worlding, of composing and composting worlds. This means shifting from the current focus upon individual human learners learning facts about the world (out there), to following and enabling collective, productive and pedagogical worldly relations.  We propose that commoning pedagogies: 

·   are inclusive modes of learning with;  

·   assemble and learn with difference (human and non-human), with heterogeneity, but not with the intention of creating sameness. They are not assimilatory;   

·   help us to learn how to live with difference in damaged heterogeneous worlds; and 

·   are cosmopolitical because they engage with the ethics and politics of living with more-than-human difference (Stengers, 2015).  

Inheriting

Inheriting is the difficult work of getting to know entangled pastpresents, answering to our own complicity in worldly cycles of life and death, and making everyday speculative moves to agitate, imagine, and put into motion futurities that take as their deep concern a hope for co-creating a more liveable future. We propose that inheriting 

·   is an ethical and political practice of care-fully, imperfectly, and modestly, getting to know the worlds we co-create in all their messiness, injustice, extinction, and hope;

·   is an ongoing practice that involves noticing, studying, answering to, and re-crafting the particular constellations of relations, ethics, politics, lives, materialities, debts, and deaths that we make and that make us; 

·   demands intentionality without a bounded trajectory that already maps a past and future;  

·   knows time as an always entangled bundle of pastpresents; 

·   disrupts and re-orients us through a tripled labour of accounting, answering, and risking toward a more liveable world.