Scholē IRL – Details, episodes & analysis

To kick off our series, we are talking with Geo Maher from the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction - a school for collective thinking and learning about injustices and political change to empower movement organizers of all ages and backgrounds to challenge and transform oppressive systems - what we think is at the heart of whatever a "schole of the undercommons" might be.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction is a political education program for aspiring revolutionaries and movement leaders from those communities most impacted by poverty, policing, and mass incarceration.

Through participatory and collective study of political economy, the history of global resistance movements, and the theoretical and practical aspects of social change, they aim to teach a new generation of organic intellectuals not only how to understand the world, but more importantly, how to change it.

Geo Maher, Ph.D., is a writer, organizer, and popular educator who has taught in colleges and universities, in prisons, and in the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela—learning an immense amount from his students in the process. Growing up poor in the Maine woods, he was taught at an early age to despise oppression, and found early inspiration in local and global struggles against capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy—and in the revolutionary internationalist vision for a new world that those who fight continue to carry in their hearts. He is the author of five books, including A World Without Police and Anticolonial Eruptions.

Time Stamps:

Intro (0:00)

What is the Abolition School? (2:37)

Impact of 2020 Protests on Abolitionist Discourse (2:37)

The Challenges of Sustaining Abolitionist Momentum (4:21)

Abolition and Reconstruction: Learning from History (7:35)

Building Alternative Structures in Abolitionist Education (12:21)

We need to create the kind of society in which these institutions do not make sense (12:44)

The capitalist system does not want you to study together (15:23)

Participatory Education: Principles and Practices (19:21)

We're all intellectuals: The organic intellectual (33:09)

Academia is going to shit quickly (38:25)

How can I continue to study because I value study because I want to understand the world? (44:19)

Creating Alternative Educational Systems and Global Collaborations (46:21)

If it's not there, build it (51:00)

Are you engaging with community? (52:52)

Outro (56:57)

Learn more and support the Abolition School here: bit.ly/abolitionschool

On our first (pre-episode) of the season, we (Sarah and Ira) share some thoughts about why we started our podcast Scholē IRL, and what is at stake in trying to make a space for thinking together in and out of collapsing university ecosystems.

But let’s face it, we’re thinking in survival mode.

Sarah talks about her journey in and out of academia, to self-identifying as a para-academic, while Ira talks about how he is situated within the university, but how hard it is to keep the lights on in a burning building. Together, we talk about what it means to make space, both internally and externally, for scholē, for thinking for the sake of thinking, and how this led us to make a podcast where we ask para-academic organizations how they are making new possibilities for people to continue to learn and think together.

Huge thank you to Devon Church for making music available from his album All That’s Solid Melts Into Air. Check out more of his music here.

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

This week, we are joined with Sigi Jöttkandt, Joanna Zylinska, and Gary Hall, the Directors of the Open Humanities Press,  an international community of scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory and a mission to make leading works of contemporary critical thought available worldwide. OHP has operated as an independent initiative since 2006, promoting open access scholarship in journals, books and exploring new forms of scholarly communication. OHP’s organization is a community-interest company headquartered in London. The OHP Editorial Board is at the heart of all their activities: participating in journal assessments, reviewing and approving book series proposals, performing and managing peer review, and editing the OHP book series. They act on the principles of access, scholarship, diversity and transparency. They have also partnered with a number of groups and institutions to explore grass-roots solutions to the crisis in Humanities publishing. 

Sigi Jöttkandt is an Associate Professor in English at UNSW. She is the author of The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame (Open Humanities Press, 2025), First Love: A Phenomenology of the One (2010) and Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic (SUNY Press, 2005). With Prue Gibson, she edits the SeedBooks series at Open Humanities Press. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique.

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist, curator, and – according to the ImageNet Roulette’s algorithm – a ‘mediatrix’. She is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. The author of a number of books on art, philosophy and technology – including The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), AI Art (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and The Perception Machine (MIT Press, 2023) – she is also involved in more experimental and collaborative publishing projects, such as Photomediations (Open Humanities Press, 2016). Her own art practice engages with different kinds of image-based media.

Gary Hall is a critical theorist and media philosopher working in the areas of digital culture, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, and was founding co-director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) from  2017 to  2025. He is the author of a number of books, including Defund Culture (mediastudies.press, 2016), Masked Media (Open Humanities Press 2025), A Stubborn Fury (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Let’s get it started here with Open Humanities Press.

Time Stamps:

 (0:00) Intro

(4:41) What is the Open Humanities Press?

(10:01) OHP as an Independent, Open-Access Publishing Collective

(13:16) Balancing Tradition with Innovation: There’s other ways of producing knowledge

(21:57) Philosophy of Care and Responsibility: It’s about people becoming connected through different forms of belonging and participation

(33:04) Alternative Academic Spaces

(37:03) Future of Scholarly Publishing

(44:06) Funding Structures and Academic Freedom: Pursuing thought wherever thought wants to go

(53:35) Critical Scholarship Amid Pressures: It isn’t easy

(1:12:52) Friendship is at the heart of OHP

(1:26:05) Outro

Support Open Humanities Press:

Learn more and support Open Humanities Press here: https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/

This episode we are joined with Cathy Kemp, Tony Beavers, and Peter Suber from the Independent Philosophy Institute, now known as Exploring the Future of Philosophy, a group of academics, mostly philosophers, greatly concerned by cutbacks to institutional philosophy in the US.

The core idea is to offer small, online philosophy seminars across a wide range of topics, texts, figures, periods, movements, and cultures. It would be administered primarily by philosophers, and exist outside conventional colleges and universities, not subject to their budgets, curricula, staffing levels, or enrollment expectations. 

Their hope, perhaps after a start-up period, is that faculty could be paid and students could earn transferable credits. The idea is still in the planning stage, and they are thinking hard about finances, quality control, curriculum, accreditation, governance, and infrastructure, among other central issues.

Cathy Kemp is Associate Professor in the philosophy department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.  She writes and teaches in the areas of early modern philosophy, especially the work and influence of David Hume, and the philosophy of law.  She received her B.A. in philosophy at Earlham College in 1987.  For more information, see her faculty page <https://www.jjay.cuny.edu/faculty/catherine-kemp>.

Tony Beavers is a Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Evansville, and an Adjunct Professor and Visiting Associate Researcher in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University. His primary interests in philosophy have centered around the history of philosophy, particularly with an eye toward reading it as a history of cognitive systems, phenomenology, and how phenomenology might be accounted for by neuroscientific and neuromorphic mechanisms rather than transcendental explanations. He's also interested in the philosophy of information and information technology, and the philosophy of complex systems. In tech, he has worked on database and search engine design, local learning, associative artificial intelligence networks, and conceptual issues addressing the relationship between technology and human cognition. To learn more about Tony, visit https://www.afbeavers.net.

Peter Suber is a Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Earlham College, Senior Advisor for Open Access in Harvard Library, and Director of the Harvard Open Access Project in the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. In philosophy, he specialized in Kant and German idealism; the history of modern European philosophy from Montaigne to Nietzsche; the history of western skepticism from Socrates to the 20th century; epistemological and ethical issues related to skepticism, such as fictionalism, ideology, self-deception, and the ethics of belief; the logical, epistemological, ethical, and legal problems of self-reference; the metatheory of first-order logic; the ethics of paternalism, consent, and coercion; and the philosophy of law. For more information, see his home page <bit.ly/petersuber>.

Time Stamps:

• (0:00) Intro

• (4:14) What is Exploring the Future of Philosophy?

• (5:49) The Crises Facing Philosophy in Universities: Increased Pressure and Cuts

• (12:49) Planning Stage of Exploring the Future of Philosophy: Preserving Depth

• (20:29) Are Universities Being Responsible to Education?

  • (22:39) We Can’t Let Go of Big Questions

• (36:00) What is Old is New Again: Books, People, Talking

  • (39:24) Students Have to Learn How Deep, Deep Can be

• (47:50) Schole: Finding a Slow Pace of Continual Inquiry in a Search for Depth

  • (49:07) Teaching Hard Books Slowly

• (50:32) Future Plans and Nonprofit Status: Funding, Accreditation, Governance, and More

• (1:06:10) Preserving the Ability to Think Deeply About Things

  • (1:07:10) What Could the Alternatives Look Like?

• (1:22:55) Flexibility in Teaching Philosophy

• (1:23:56) Saving Philosophy: Let’s See What the Possibilities Are

• (1:28:12) Outro

People think.

This week, we are talking with Rafael Khachaturian from the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, a para-academic institution offering a variety of courses across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences to people who are interested in pursuing questions outside of the boundaries of the traditional university. We talk about how BISR is turning academic precarity into a site of solidaristic strength, how they’ve moved from an experimental to essential phase as attacks in higher education have increased, what it means to be a scholar, and how people are still coming together to think, despite everything that tries to prevent us from doing so. People never stop thinking.

The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research is an interdisciplinary teaching and research institute that offers critical, community-based education in the humanities and social sciences. Working in partnership with local businesses and cultural organizations, we integrate rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults and re-imagine scholarship for the 21st century.

Rafael Khachaturian is an Associate Faculty member with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where he teaches social and political theory. His research is at the intersection of theories of the state, critical theory, and the history of the social sciences. His writing has appeared in both scholarly journals and public venues, including Jacobin, The Nation, and Dissent. He is the co-editor of Marxism and the Capitalist State: Toward a New Debate, which appeared in 2023. Together with Igor Shoikhedbrod, he is currently translating and editing The Revolution of Law: Developments in Soviet Legal Theory, 1917-1931, which is under contract with Brill and which will appear in the Historical Materialism series with Haymarket. He is a Lecturer in Critical Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Time Stamps:

• Intro (0:00)

• What is the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research? (2:34)

  • Crisis in Higher Education and BISR’s Role (6:33)

  • Building Community at BISR (13:23)

• Scholarship and Public Accessibility (20:22)

  • Scholarship as inseparable from citizenship (23:33)

• Future of Learning Spaces: Rethinking the Purpose of Higher Education (28:22)

• Human Flourishing and Neoliberal Mindset (36:31)

  • We’ve taken the possibility of human flourishing off the table (37:03)

• Marxism and Historical Materialism (40:44)

• People Never Stop Thinking (53:16)

• Outro (54:45)

Learn more and support the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research here: https://thebrooklyninstitute.com/items/support/

This week, we are joined with Mason Herson-Horvath from the Institute for Social Ecology, an independent institution of higher education dedicated to the study of social ecology, an interdisciplinary field drawing on philosophy, political and social theory, anthropology, history, economics, the natural sciences, and feminism. The ISE has offered intensive summer programs, a year-round B.A. degree program, workshops on issues such as biotechnology and global justice, fall and winter lecture series, internship opportunities, an expanding catalog of online courses, and a speakers bureau. In addition, the ISE is involved in research as well as publishing and activist projects.

As an educational and activist organization, the ISE is committed to the social and ecological transformation of society. Established in 1974 by Murray Bookchin and Dan Chodorkoff, it is the ISE’s core belief that the human potential to play a creative role in natural and social evolution can be realized, thereby allowing us to foster communities free from hierarchy, social inequity, and ecological degradation. The ISE views the global penetration of systems of domination into daily life, the centralization of political and economic power, the homogenization of culture, and the strengthening of hierarchy and social control as impediments to human freedom and the root causes of the current ecological crisis. The ISE has been a pioneer in the exploration of alternative technologies and ecological means of food production, like organic gardening and permaculture. Studies at the ISE have combined theoretical and experiential learning in community organizing, political action, ecological economics, and sustainable building and land use. Over its history, the ISE has strived to be an agent of social transformation, demonstrating the skills, ideas, and relationships that can nurture vibrant, self-governed, ecological communities.

Mason Herson-Horvath is the program director of the Institute for Social Ecology. He is an organizer, writer, communal gardener, and neighborhood democracy militant. His other work (previously under the name Mason Herson-Hord) has been published in ROAR Magazine, the Next System Project, In These Times, The Ecologist, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Socialist Forum, and Harbinger: A Journal of Social Ecology. He is currently finishing a book on Marxism and direct democracy, and building a commune in Bellingham, WA.

Time Stamps:

(0:00) Intro

(3:30) What is the Institute for Social Ecology?

(10:42) Neoliberalism and Academia Challenges

(14:44) ISE’s Growth Amid Global Movements

(18:38) Building Community: Summer Intensive program, Mentorship programs, community organizing training, and more.

(24:08) Being at the intersection between actual movement activity and reflection upon that activity

(27:40) The Cadre Model: A collective study of where we are and live, and moving together with theoretical and tactical unity

(33:12) Writing as a practice to clarify your own thinking and ideas in motion.

(36:47) The future of learning spaces

(45:13) The centrality of philosophical questions to the work at the ISE: What kind of society ought we to have? What ought the relationship be between human beings and the rest of the living world?

(47:18) Outro

This week, we are joined with Tuba İnal Çekiç, Cagla Diner, and Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi (Safi), from Off University, a self-organisation of scholars at risk who seek new strategies to sustain academic life threatened by anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes. Off University was established by scholars in Turkey, yet addresses itself to a public all over the world: Academics who have been purged from their institutions, forced to resign, who are legally and politically persecuted and even imprisoned because of their opinion and research by anti-democratic regimes, and those who seek to speak up against these practices in solidarity. 

Tuba İnal Çekiç came to Germany in 2016 after working in academic institutions in Turkey. She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from Yıldız Technical University and works at the intersection of urban sociology, spatial theory, and planning. Her research and publications focus on urban conflicts, migration, spatial justice, authoritarian urbanism, and democratic transformation. Currently based in Berlin, she is particularly interested in how power, inequality, and resistance shape urban space, and in linking academic research with urban practice and everyday experiences. She is a Co-Founder of Off-University, where she contributes to developing collaborative formats of research, learning, and knowledge production. 

Cagla Diner came to Germany in 2018 as an “Academy in Exile” Fellow, after working as a faculty member at Kadir Has University in Istanbul for eleven years. She holds a PhD in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University. Her research and publications focus on the relationship between economics, knowledge, and politics; women’s organizations in Turkey; and policymaking on women’s poverty. She currently lives in Germany and is concerned with the production and dissemination of knowledge in migration studies, as well as with independent and community-based forms of knowledge creation, engaging with Off University to foster more independent and collective approaches to knowledge production. 
Mohamad Moustafa Alabsi (Safi) holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Grenoble-Alpes/France. His thesis focused on the relationship between regime and state in the contemporary Middle East, and the notions of “enemy”, “revolution” and “civil war” in political and legal theories as well as in the Arab Spring lessons and realities. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia Global Center – Amman. His personal and academic project is about the creation of an Arabic encyclopedia of political philosophy, making in-depth knowledge of state theory literature available, especially for Arab students. His research areas are philosophy of law, forms of regimes and of dictatorship, the totalitarian state and the one-party state. Safi believes in action and in initiative, that’s why he’s very excited to work with Off University. Over the last few years, Safi has been working on his project “the Syrian Library” which is a knowledge-transfer project consisting in providing Arabic-access database about Western studies of the Syrian conflict.

Time Stamps:

(0:00) Intro

(4:50) What is Off University? How a group of scholars at risk created space to sustain academic life and knowledge threatened by anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes

(7:04) Challenges facing Exiled Scholars: The growing gap between the idea of academic freedom and the reality of scholars

(14:25) Making Space for Community: The Need for Solidarity

(20:09) Ongoing Practices, Projects, and Collaborations

(25:42) Challenging Traditional Ways of Thinking about Academic Knowledge: How to Collectivize and Transfer Knowledge Production

(38:02) Power of Tales: Giving Us Something to Hold on to as we Struggle

(46:13) Hijacking the System: Creating New Possibilities for Scholars at Risk

(55:04) Outro

This week, we are joined with Jon Roffe and Matt Keyter from the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and FOPA. 

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy (MSCP) is an independent teaching and research organization established in 2002 by a group of mildly disaffected postgrad students from the University of Melbourne philosophy department. It was created in a spirit of resistance to the hidebound conventionality of modern day university life - to the ongoing crisis of corporatist mentality shaping funding systems, grant allocations, research schemes, and teaching and assessment regimes.

MSCP was created in a friendly spirit of non-conformity in reaction to this, inviting students and fellow philosophers to experiment with what philosophical thinking can offer outside the rigmarole of university procedure. MSCP offers short courses during the summer and winter university holiday periods and evening courses during the semester. They also run single day research workshops in autumn and spring, organize reading groups and work to encourage and support philosophical thinking in the community, keeping alive the very possibility of philosophizing itself.

FOPA (Festival of Para-Academia) is developing collective equipment for para-academia by making the platforms, vehicles and events to grow knowledgeable publics. In other words, they are building the collective equipment for a new educational paradigm. Para-academia, put simply, is knowledge transfer outside of official state institutions. Including lectures, seminars, workshops, talks, presentations, teach-ins etc., they believe that the idea of how we experiment is the stake of learning itself. Para-academia is the generic ideal of education appearing within the social body. FOPA is taking a leading research, design and advocacy role in this emergent and innovative sphere. Their vision is to realize an ecotone comprising the TAFE (Technical and Further Education), university, arts and cultural sectors in Australia. FOPA believes this intersection of human flourishing will be critical to the development of new forms of inclusive prestige and social belonging in times of diminished trust in expertise.

Jon Roffe was the original convenor of the MSCP and has been a long-time lecturer. He is the co-editor of Understanding Derrida (Continuum) and Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage (EUP) and the author of Badiou's Deleuze (Acumen).  His work concerns twentieth century and contemporary French philosophy, and he has published on a range of figures in this context, including Badiou, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and Meillassoux.

Matt Keyter undertook an education at the MSCP for more than a decade. He served on its executive from 2017 - 2025. He now does work at FOPA.

Time Stamps:

(0:00) Intro

(3:55) Origins of the MSCP

(12:07) Fostering Para-Academic Entities: MSCP as an engine and incubator for the proliferation of projects

(13:27) What is FOPA (Festival of Para-Academia)?

(17:44) Challenges in Philosophy and Traditional Academia

(25:02) A Core Stubborn Commitment to Philosophy: Building Community

(28:41) Para-Academia as permaculture practice: blossoming and blooming and mixed fields and spheres

(32:41) Being the carer and bearer of a possibility

(38:28) Schole names a a stubborn persistence

(50:00) Supporting radical educational projects

(56:21) On creating a decentralized public arts college: no credentials, only new orientations

(1:00:08) Influential thinkers and scholars

(1:04:44) People don’t join ideas, people join things

(1:08:37) We just need to do it ourselves

(1:11:30) Outro