This week, we are joined with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi from 3Ecologies, an autonomous learning environment exploring collective techniques for creative thought and practice. Its activities are radically open, guided by an ethos of self-organization and open accessibility. It affirms the value of neurodiversity and non-normative modes of thinking, being, and perceiving.
As an alternative or supplement to the university, the 3Ecologies Project does not grant credit or degrees, nor does it offer teaching services. It regards participation in collective thought and practice as rewards in themselves. Its aim is not to transmit already packaged knowledge, but to explore new modes of knowledge production that push the limits of how we know.
The 3Ecologies Project is a non-profit organization officially registered in Québec, Canada.
Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal where she is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (Duke 2016), For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020) and Out of the Clear (forthcoming, minor compositions). Her artwork is textile-based and relationally-oriented, often participatory. She is interested in the detail of material complexity, in what reveals itself to perception sideways, in the quality of a textural engagement with life. Her work often plays synesthetically with touch, of recent in acknowledgement and experimentation with the ProTactile movement for DeafBlind culture and language. Tactile propositions include large-scale hangings produced with a diversity of tools including tufting, hooking, knotting, weaving. 3e is the main direction her current research takes - an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.
Brian Massumi is a contemporary political theorist of communication, critical and cultural studies, philosophy, political theory, science, and aesthetics. One of the foremost thinkers of “radical empiricism,” he is responsible for enabling the widespread use of Deleuzean philosophy in communication and inaugurating the so-called “affective turn” in the theoretical humanities. Massumi is a retired Professor of Communication at the Université de Montréal and a collaborator of 3Ecologies, founded by Erin Manning. His most well-known translation is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and he is the author of many influential books, including Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), First and Last Emperors (1993), 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value (2018), and most recently, Toward a Theory of Facism for Anti-Fascist Life: A Process Vocabulary (2025).
Time Stamps:
(0:00) Intro
(5:26) What is 3Ecologies?
(10:33) Event-Based Learning: Engaging Beyond Academics: 3E as Emergent and Self-Organizing
(13:05) Land-Based Practices and Emergent Learning
(22:07) Attuning to Emergent Learning: Maple Syrup Sampling
(28:15) Giving the Land Back to Itself: Emergence through Propositional Learning
(31:06) Anarchival Processes: Archiving Trace Events that can Become Seeds of New Events
(43:32) Off-Grid Learning Spaces: Freedom and Challenges
(49:54) Schole: Leisurely Study Beyond Structures. Taking Time to Read Slowly in Reading Groups
(1:01:13) Embracing Differences in Learning
(1:12:05) Influential Thinkers: Neurodiversity and Academia
(1:26:40) Outro
