Abstract
Drawing on the critical theories of Ernst Bloch and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, as well as on the knowledge and learning practices of counter-capitalist social movements, Amsler’s chapter offers a reading of political hopelessness amongst educators in England through a critical epistemology which discloses it as ‘unfinished’ and potent material within a global politics of possibility. She invokes methods from Bloch’s critical process-philosophy of ‘learning hope’ which allows for three reality-shifting operations: (1) the making of distinctions between what is ‘not’, ‘not-yet’ and ‘nothing’ in experience and historical process; (2) identifying and creating ‘fronts’ of possibility for mediating reality in concretely utopian ways; and (3) the recognition of a multiplicity of anti-hegemonic scales and modes of transformation, and explains why these matter in movements not just for social change but for the immanent creation of an other reality.
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Notes
- 1.
Examples include the Landless Workers Movement’s Florestan Fernandes School, organising political education of movement militants outside and in collaboration with state universities in Brazil (MST 2016); the Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth) in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico (Esteva 2007); the ‘Living Learning’ practices of the Abahlali baseMjondolo and Rural Network movements in South Africa (Figlan et al. 2009); and the land-based education Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning in the Canadian (traditional Denendeh) Northwest Territories (Freeland Ballantyne 2014). See also, reflections on recent ‘ecoversity’ gatherings in Teamey and Mandell (2014, 2016).
- 2.
Current examples include Anti-University Now, the Free University of Brighton, Leicester People’s University, Social Science Centre, and the Provisional University (in Ireland), with past projects including Birmingham Radical Education, Free University of Liverpool, Free University Network, Nottingham Free School, Really Open University, Tent City University (Occupy) and more. Other authors refer to this field of projects in Britain as a movement (Lazarus 2013; Saunders and Ghanimi 2013); see also Amsler and Lazarus (2012) for archival commentary on the UK-based Free University Network.
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Amsler, S. (2016). Learning Hope. An Epistemology of Possibility for Advanced Capitalist Society. In: Dinerstein, A. (eds) Social Sciences for an Other Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47776-3_2
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