Night Study (2025-2026)

As we move ever closer to dictatorial leadership in the world, Night Study will reflect on the history of subversive educational forms, their emancipatory traditions and the need for collective study. Developed in collaboration with L’Internationale Online and in association with the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary (CAPin), Night Study aims to engage artists and educators in research on the politics of adult education and public pedagogy in contemporary society. At a time when education is overly motivated by economic values, at the expense of its social, political and subjective dimensions, this research prioritises social justice, democracy and freedom of speech as focal concepts. Providing an alternative space for educational thought outside the university curricular structure, Night Study is open to all educators in the Arts and Humanities.   

This research builds upon earlier experimental pedagogical research such as the Hedgeschoolproject (2006-2012). Inspired by the non-state character of the eighteenth-century Irish hedge school movement this earlier research explored the nature of “the event” in education. Reframing the hedge school movement as an evental education, the project intitiated a series of experimental schools. Uniquely, the construction of each school was organised methodologically to mediate the study of the event of the historical hedge schools, their guiding principles of equality and emancipation, and the reconsideration of these within contemporary contexts where they remained immanent. The first iteration of the project, Eco House (2006) constructed from straw bales was developed in a rural Irish community with early school leavers. The second iteration, The Literacy House (2008), worked with the Traveller community in North Dublin, and the third iteration, The Precariat Academy (2012) was implemented at the Kaunas Textile Biennale in a freight container, with workers from the surrounding sewing factories. Night Study is informed by this earlier experimentation with evental pedagogies but now responds to the changed terms and politics of adult education and public pedagogy in the contemporary moment of new fascist formations in ascendance. 

The project begins with an online seminar series on collective study, through a reading of Lewis and Hyland’s paper The Antifascist Politics of Studioing (2022) and Tyson Lewis’s book Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education: From Riddles to Radio (2020). Tyson Lewis’s educational research previously focused on the politics of collective study, as a space of im-potentiality that can suspend the means-end logic of learning. In Walter Benjamin’s Antifascist Education: From Riddles to Radio, Lewis aims to recover Walter Benjamin’s work as an educational philosophy for our times.  

The seminar series takes place Wednesday evenings, 7pm-9pm CET: April 23, May 21, June 18, July 23, August 20, and September 17, October 15th 2025. To join the seminar please email Glenn for further details.