The School of Commons Assembly is a peer-driven, commons-based gathering that foregrounds collective inquiry, shared practice, and alternative modes of knowledge production. Moving away from conventional symposium structures of “giving” and “receiving,” the Assembly fosters spaces of mutual exchange, co-creation, and relational learning rooted in mutual support and shared responsibility.
In 2025, the Assembly convened across hybrid sites in Zürich and online around the guiding question “How to Assemble in our current social, political, economic, ecological times?” Bringing together SoC participants, practitioners, and communities, the programme unfolded through transdisciplinary working groups, workshops, exhibitions, and discussions that approached knowledge exchange not as transmission, but as collective practice. Guest facilitators included Fiky Daulay and Nuraini Juliastuti (KUNCI Study Forum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia), Zoë Heyn-Jones and Ana Rivera (Materia Abierta, Mexico City, Mexico), Rosalie Schweiker (Migrants in Culture, London, UK), Yuri Tuma (Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid, Spain), and Sepp Eckenhaussen (Caradt Research Group, St. Joost Academy / Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, NL). Together, we co-shaped a programme grounded in process, reciprocity, and collective authorship, foregrounding collaborative knowledge, care, and shared practice across disciplines, contexts, and geographies.
The 2026 iteration — Making a Vessel in the Sky — unfolds fully online, building on this foundation at a moment of transition. It follows an online Town Hall, Tensile Structures, which gathered the community in a shared digital space of reflection, accountability, and reorientation. Together, the Town Hall and Assembly 2026 establish a fully online, globally accessible format for collective inquiry.
Reframing assembly as a vessel born of shared belief, care, and coordination, the 2026 Assembly invites participants into a horizon of relational practice rather than static expertise. Anchored in an open, global online format and open participation, key moments include the Cohort Programme, a reflective workshop, the ISSUES Launch 2025: Exquisite Commons as an open archival and commoning practice, and the Learning Commons Round Table: Tensile Structures, reconvening facilitators from the previous Assembly.
Together, SoC Assemblies enact a commons-based method for assembling knowledge and community, where exchange, experimentation, and care form the infrastructure of collective inquiry beyond traditional institutional frameworks — now extended into shared digital space as a relational, accessible, and distributed commons.