Insurgent Knowledges Ateneo

The Insurgent Knowledges ateneo is an open space for reflection, celebration, and action that engages the vexed and incomplete project of insurgent knowledge production. By insurgent knowledge production we mean questions around four specific themes. We are committed to exploring an activist ethnography that is more than a critical attitude to strategies of representation, a conscious engagement with movement solidarity, or a militant posture at movement spaces. Rather, we pursue activist ethnography approaches that are the strategic outcome of collective and situational thinking. We are animated by the specific tools increasingly available in popular education, participatory or militant research, collective facilitation, and direct action casework arenas. We especially welcome those technologies that promote tequios de investigación, or community generated research projects that address local struggles. We welcome innovations in documenting struggles and local projects as a living archive --an effort at the intersections of convivial research and insurgent learning. With a conviction to go beyond explaining experts, the ateneo seeks situated, convivial tools that uncover competing knowledges and practices while amplifying less recognized subjugated, situated, and poetic knowledges. As a critical dimension of collective learning spaces, the ateneo recognizes the importance of generating questions as a convivial technology that emerges in and through strategic gatherings.

We deploy the ateneo not as an advanced seminar, conference, workshop, plenary, or research cluster space typical of the academy but to insist on open, diffuse spaces that can facilitate locally generated research, learning, and community formation. As a space that allows us to gather as a diverse community, it potentially transcends bureaucratic structures and professional identities to promote horizontal reflection, celebration, and action. Associated with late 19th century Spanish anarchism and made increasingly popular along with the social centers and okupas of the alterglobalization struggle, or “movement of movements,” the ateneo has been part of a resurgence of “worker” organized research projects and learning spaces . The idea is not to limit the ateneo by the protocols and practices typical of academic and non-profit spaces but to recover local histories and inspire insurgent imaginaries.

Insurgent Knowledges Ateneo

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