AA Academy concept
The Amsterdam Alternative Academie is a space to think together about our world. Resistance starts with collective consciousness and consciousness starts with analysis. We will discuss texts and others cultural objects on the topics of capitalism, climate crisis, gender, racism, digitization, and also everyday life (because the personal is still political). We do so by taking an intersectional perspective on capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy and other dominant power structures.
Once, university was a community of equals. We want to return to that ideal (but diverse and intersectional, because of course Medieval ideals also only went so far). AA Academie is an inclusive space. We discuss texts in such way that everyone can join regardless of prior knowledge or education. Every person has creative ideas. Let’s create room for those ideas! The meetings are bilingual in Dutch and English, also in that respect we will be creative.
In May and June this year the first three meetings of the Amsterdam Alternative Academy (AAA) took place. This is a low-threshold initiative of Amsterdam Alternative, to discuss one or more texts collectively and in a cooperative, intersectional and anti-capitalist atmosphere, based on a theme. Before the summer, that theme was the question of whether there is life after capitalism, guided by Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism.
This fall we will continue the sessions of the AAA in the OT301, every Wednesday evening, with a frequency of once every two or three weeks. We will start on September 21 with a discussion of a chapter from the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, on how to design a space for collective learning. This is an attempt to make the design of the AAA a little less messy, and a little more participatory and emancipatory. On November 23 we will discuss how we can still save the climate, based on Andreas Malm’s book Eco-sabotage, the Dutch translation of his How to blow up a pipeline. And the last two meetings, on October 12 and December 7, will be devoted to the question of what a feminist anti-capitalism could look like. For this we will use the book Feminism for the 99% (published by Verso and not yet translated), and possibly also Philosophical Trends in Feminism by Anuradha Ghandy.
The evenings start at 8 pm and are free to all. The language of discussion will be English, but we will probably work with breakup groups, of which at least one will be in Dutch. On request, the texts to be discussed will be sent in advance as pdf files, in English and Dutch. On the evenings themselves A4 sheets are available with a short description of the theme and a number of discussion points, also in English and Dutch.
Everyone is welcome to join the organization of the AAA. Send an email to: academy(at)amsterdamalternative.nl
Subscribe to our newsletter
If you want to be kept up to date about Amsterdam Alternative and our projects/initiatives then please subscribe to our email newsletter. We will not spam you with lots of emails and we will not share or sell your contact details to other organisations.