Our application for the Summer 2021 Cohort is closed. Applicants will be notified about their application status by May 30th, 2021 through email.
The Otherwise School is a project-based summer school for the people, taking place from June 14- July 23, 2021.
The first cohort of 20 participants will engage in a series of keynotes, round table discussions, workshops and prototyping of counter-fascism tools. We have 12 paid and 8 unpaid seats—applicants can choose whether to apply for a paid or an unpaid seat. Each paid participant will receive a stipend of $2000 for their time, all applicants will receive the opportunity to publish in a special edition of the ACM Interactions Journal.
We are mostly a diaspora-driven initiative at the moment, though we welcome applications globally from scholars, activists, artists, journalists and people with no institutional affiliation. If you have immigration or visa concerns, we encourage you to reach out to us directly at otherwise at uw dot edu. We are committed to welcoming applications globally and are happy to provide consultation for each individual’s circumstance.
Goals
The idea for the Otherwise School is born out of some of the looming questions of our times, such as, what would it take for us to build technologies of resistance in the face of an ongoing global crisis of fascism, capitalism, anti-blackness? How can we best locate technology in these intersecting forces of harm? What comes after this analysis?
This Summer of 2021, for the duration of six weeks (June 14 – July 23), we will hold a space for a cohort of 12 participants—artists, activists, technology workers, graduate students, scholars—for learning tools and techniques of counter-fascism. Our cohort of Summer 2021 will be learning with social movements and community organizations fighting repression, violence, and extraction directed at them by nation-states and their operators—particularly from people’s movements in the context of Tigray, Oromia, and the Black US South.
In these six weeks, we hope to generate a series of dialogues, reflections, artifacts, strategies, relationships toward a transnational agenda of people’s democracy. A part of which will be archived as a Special Issue on Design and Democracy for the ACM Interactions magazine.
Beyond publishing, some of our other concrete goals for this summer include:
- Developing a framework connecting global forces of oppression that is converging into a rise of fascism, and the technologies that are enabling this trend worldwide.
- Prototyping tools, techniques, and strategies for counter-fascist work that can be supported via the power of diaspora.
- Deepening a daily technology practice. For example, the limitations and possibilities of Whats App, Signal or Facebook Messenger as it relates to safety and accessibility. Or thinking about who will be the custodian of the archives for public webinars.
Accountability
The Otherwise School’s mission is to develop tools and techniques for counter-fascism grounded in transnational analysis of power. Ultimately, local contexts are what we need to be accountable to. To this end, we welcome applications globally from people who may have deep cultural and/or political context as activists, artists or scholars but could benefit from intensives on how technology fits into an analysis of power and a framework for how to make meaningful connections globally.
We acknowledge that in practice, our features and worldview are primarily shaped by members of the diaspora. We are bound by the constraints of global fascism ourselves. Confronting neoliberalism, imperialism, and militarization means it may be unsafe for some people to participate from the very regions we’ve selected as sites of analysis. Political repression and resource asymmetries that constrain local contexts (such as India) also produce diaspora networks. We recognize that there is a strategic opportunity within a space that brings together those organizing “back home” and “here”. Reflecting on these diasporic tensions is central to the process of developing tools and techniques for counter-fascism.
The Otherwise School is a collaboration between J. Khadijah Abdurahaman’s initiative We Be Imagining and Sucheta Ghoshal’s research collective Inquilab at the University of Washington. The program for Summer 2021 is generously funded by the Human-Centered Design and Engineering department at the University of Washington.