The Global Latinidades Center Launches Pilot Workshop with Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca!
Participants & Principles
The Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), a transterritorial research collective, in collaboration with the Global Latinidades Project at University of California, Santa Barbara, USA (UCSB), Academy of Media Arts, Cologne, Germany (KHM), New York University (NYU), and Universidad de la Tierra, Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as partners in additional universities across the U.S., Mexico, and Spain will convene an autonomous summer learning space, or ateneo, to be held virtually and in person in Oaxaca in spring and summer of 2022.
This unique convergence brings together scholars, public intellectuals, and grassroots activists for reflection and action engaging critical issues associated with what the Zapatistas theorize as the 4th World War, understood as a longstanding counterinsurgency, ongoing war against subsistence practices and vernacular knowledges, and imposed forgetting and oblivion. Our goal in this autonomous summer learning space will be to share convivial research and insurgent learning projects, e.g. tequios de investigación, or collectively determined community-based research projects, that engage directly with aspects of the 4th world war and opposition to it.
By convivial research and insurgent learning we mean an approach to knowledge production that refuses to objectify communities of struggle while also listening and sensing for the many convivial tools, or those collectively agreed upon interdependent devices fundamental to community regeneration, including those that draw on a range of vernacular knowledges and subsistence practices that locally rooted struggles make available. Specifically, we want to share our own experiences and insights pursuant to effective theories and practices that challenge elements of the 4th world war that include, for example, counterinsurgency, militarized policing and border enforcement, the international carceral state and other forms of informalized gendered violence as well as the construction of autonomous alternatives. We ultimately seek to collaboratively share insights, practices, and knowledges essential to the development of autonomous, convivial alternatives to the endemic violences of late racial patriarchal capitalism.
Our goal during our virtual and in person meetings, beginning with sessions in April leading up to and during our convergence in August, will be to share the convivial devices and disqualified knowledges forged in struggle. The formal consistent spaces we will convene will include four monthly virtual ateneo (April to July 2022) leading up to a ten-day program in Oaxaca that will include a primary ateneo along with an additional tertulia, or informal gathering, as well as talleres, or workshops, and various excursions as collectively determined.
Our efforts will weave together a social fabric made up of a network of temporary autonomous zones of knowledge production. In addition to the core group of conveners from the above-named universities, we will be joined by invited guests and additional friends who may drop-in from a range of active autonomous projects and spaces across the globe. Our goal will be to convene open accessible consistent spaces that will interface with already established projects and spaces in and throughout Oaxaca.
Schedule
The CCRA Summer Ateneo 2022 will meet beginning in April leading up to a convergence in person in Oaxaca in August. We have designated the third Saturday of each month from 11.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m PST for our meeting schedule. (April 16; May 21; June 18; July 16; and August 1-11). Our strategy will be to activate the ateneo each month around agreements with the principal agreement to generate questions in such a way as to collectively assess our interests/resources, organize our shared research, and document/archive our collective reflections. We can also use questions to accumulate a range of relevant texts that can be archived so they are accessible over the next few months. We may also want to develop a glossary of key concepts as part of the effort to document our process and the knowledge we co-produce. Our goal in using this approach will be to ensure that the space we collectively convene will be as horizontal as possible, reflecting the interests of each participant and preparing us for our gathering in Oaxaca.
We also recognize that not everyone will be able to participate in every monthly gathering before August, so we will document each gathering by way of summary that will be available on the CCRA Summer Ateneo 2022 web page (forthcoming). We look forward to our first session on Saturday, April 16 from 11.00 a.m. to 1.00 p.m. PST (contact us for the meeting link). It is our hope that everyone interested in the CCRA Summer Ateneo 2022 will participate in April and as many spaces leading up to August in Oaxaca.
Summer Program in Oaxaca
Arrive Monday, August 1 Program begins: Tuesday, August 2 Program ends: Thursday, August 11 Closing fiesta: Thursday, August 11 Program Structure Morning session ateneo: 9.00 a.m. – 2.00 p.m. with coffee break Afternoon session tertulia 4.00 p.m. (optional) UT Oaxaca Conversatorio Wednesdays, 4.00 p.m.
