SoC Assembly 2025

The School of Commons (SoC) Assembly 2025 is a two-day gathering for exchanging and the (alternative) reproduction and circulation of knowledge that seeks to approach, contend, and complicate 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 for 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 have invited a series of guest facilitators from across specialisms, experiences, contexts, and disciplines who will each convene a working group, organised around core topics and issues that we believeAssembly participants, and their communities face in their daily work and life. These topics include tools and schools for improper education, “seed-time” as a method for addressing bio cultural urgencies, visual community organising, expanding notions of care through listening and sound, and the mapping of visible and invisible commons.

During the Assembly, facilitators, participants, and current and former SoC cohort participants will be invited into an active exchange of transdisciplinary inquiry, including the sharing of methods and frameworks, establishing of environments for learning, and raising of questions and propositions, 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 and to create new forms and scopes of ‘assembling’ in the broadest sense. In doing so, bridging theory with practice, thinking with doing, and providing new frameworks for organising, practicing, and researching as methods for transferring these approaches into differing environments, scales, and contexts.

Over the two-days, the SoC Assembly will be organised into a Morning Programme* dedicated to Working Groups for learning and exchanging, convened by guest facilitators, and an Afternoon Programme* of exhibitions, lectures, and workshops, organised by the SoC Cohort 2025. The event will culminate in an AssemblyPodium that brings the guest facilitators, SoC participants, and audience together to reflect upon and gather the means, modes, and forms of and for expanded assembling that have emerged over the weekend.

With Guest Facilitators:

Materia Abierta, represented by Ana Rivera & Federico Pérez Villoro (Mexico City, Mexico)

Migrants in Culture, represented by Rosalie Schweiker (London, UK)

Massimiliano Mollona (London, UK)

Institute of Postnatural Studies, represented by Yuri Tuma (Madrid, Spain)

KUNCI Study Forum*, represented by Fiky Daulay & Nuraini Juliastuti (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) *joining digitally

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, represented by Artistic Director of Casco Art Institute (Utrecht, Netherlands)

Sophie Mak-Schram (Wales, UK)