Private: Pleasure & Protest, Sometimes Simultaneously: A Free School

This version of the Free School model embraces free access to ideas in an open learning environment through an engagement with visual culture, radical philosophy and social justice. Current events that take up protest, free speech and social change inform the staging of public readings, conversations, and open seminars. Our desire is to explore issues, ideas, and texts that critically inquire into the production of coercive social norms while celebrating feminist, postcolonial, critical race queer theory as catalysts for transformational politics.

In seeking to establish solidarities across hegemonic border-zones, we will strive to open an inclusive dialogue, which is at once multi-generational and geographically dispersed. What is of critical import in our contemporary moment is a better understanding of how all forms of violence and oppression must be recognized as relational and not thought of as discrete or antithetical struggles. Our advocacy for a perspective of strategic (dis)orientation is tied to how we each speak about our struggles and commitments and the ways in which meaning is constructed out of an active engagement with signs and images.