BIRARADA INSTITUTE / EDUCATION
One of the founding aims of the BIRARADA Association is to create the appropriate setting and means for the emergence of “another academy”. The members of the Association are academics who question the hegemonic institutional structures and mechanisms, and thus academic activities that function in favor of the status quo. By reconsidering and reflecting on our own academic socialization and scientific practices, we, as members of the Association, adopt the goal of establishing the grounds for the collective production of knowledge and learning processes. In this regard, we consider it inevitable to purge the relationships and interactions that constitute the intertwined ‘learning processes’ and ‘knowledge production processes’ from established practices that involve hierarchy, and commodification of knowledge.
We believe that the pursuit of another academy cannot be envisaged without the notion of another form of society and the struggle for a new life. We consider this quest as a matter of re-designing the entire academic field and life alongside knowledge production spaces and practices, and with different forms of subjecthood. By doing so, we aim to provide the participants in these practices the opportunity to re-making themselves through their own differences as well as their relations with knowledge and their ways of knowledge acquisition.
Collective Construction of Emancipatory Learning Processes at BİRARADA Institute
BİRARADA Institute brings to bear the emancipatory education practices as part of the construction process of ‘another academy’. The learning processes, carried out in the Institute are founded on the approach that considers peace as the basis for relations among humans, society and nature. The learning processes, the selection of topics, analyses and discussions are considered and problematized with reference to this approach. As the Institute builds these processes it excludes any epistemological and methodological approach that turns knowledge, science, education into a means for power and domination, instrumentalizes, commercializes them, makes them dependent on the free market. Recognizing that the construction processes of emancipatory learning processes are continual requires to promote emancipatory imagination continually. It is apt to consider that the notions of equality and freedom that we embrace from the start would be nourished, developed and transformed through our collective practices and this would, in turn, lead to new practices of emancipation.