SITAC Education Justice

January 22

We examine learning as a form of re-occupation, both cognitive and spatial, in precarious political and physical contexts. The condition of physical displacement (including disappearance) is central to this day, that takes off from Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti’s School Under a Tree (“shared living in a state of displacement”), informed by their work in a refugee camp in Palestine.

SITAC XII opens with the metaphorical moment of silence, a calibration of the given context, politically, culturally and institutionally. With their video piece Moments of Silence, Swedish artists Lars Bergström and Mats Bigerts speak of the world in such a condition of pause as “a frozen arrow pointing at the thought of something important, so important that it should never be forgotten.” A tall order that the conference cannot aspire to, but certainly this moment in early 2015 does in the aftermath of the profound repercussions of the abduction and disappearance of young students in Iguala, Guerrero, the murder of young black men in the United States, and the criminalization of marginalized peoples in too many places in between.