SoC Assembly

The School of Commons (SoC) Assembly 2025 is a two-day facilitated space for gathering, exchange, and the reproduction and circulation of knowledge and experience that seeks to question, complicate, and contend with the question: 'How to assemble [in our current social, political, economic, ecological times]'.

In contrast to traditional symposium structures of knowledge ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’, the SoC Assembly borrows from commons-based models and formats of alternative knowledge production and circulation, to create an exchange space based upon a reciprocation economy of mutual support and mutual sharing.

For the SoC Assembly, we invite a series of guest facilitators from across geographies, specialisms, contexts, and disciplines who will each caretake for a working group, organised around core topics and issues that Assembly participants, and their communities, face in their daily work and life. 

During the Assembly facilitators, participants, and current and former SoC cohort participants will be invited into an active exchange of transdisciplinary inquiry; sharing methods and frameworks, establishing environments for learning, raising questions and propositions, all unbounded from discipline or taxonomy.

The SoC Assembly encourages explorations into alternative ways and workings to produce, distribute, and make public alternative forms of knowledge, gathering, and exchanging, and to create new forms and scopes of ‘assembling’ in the broadest sense.In doing so, bridging theory with practice, and thinking with doing, to provide new frameworks for organising, practicing, and researching, and methods for transferring these approaches into differing environments, scales, and contexts.

Over the two days, the SoC Assembly will feature dedicated working groups focused on learning and exchange, along with a program of exhibitions, lectures, and workshops organised by the SoC Cohort 2025 as part of their end-of-year showcase as part of a networked structure. The event will culminate in a podium that brings the guest facilitators, SoC participants, and audience together to reflect upon and gather new means, modes, and forms of and for assembling.

Guest facilitators will be announced in December, with a detailed program set to be published in January 2025.

For inquiries, contact hello@schoolofcommons.org.