Monthly Archives: July 2015

Tie-dye banner made at the Plan C creche for the Anti-Austerity demonstration, June 20th.

The Free University of Sheffield are pleased to announce our 4th soup seminar, hosted by the amazing Union St again!

We’ll be having our fourth ever soup seminar on Thursday, August 6th at 6.30pm. The cooking will start at 4pm for those who want to join in.

In the soup seminars we come together to cook and eat food, and discuss how we can act to change society’s problems. We are creating a community of thinkers and activists to come together and work out constructive solutions to the problems we face today. (All food is vegan).

Last week we discussed the importance of activists providing alternatives for oppressed groups, using Plan C and the Black Panther Party as talking points.

We discussed the alternatives that already exist in Sheffield — such as Timebuilders — and how we might support them or bring students into them. After all, we don’t want to simply replicate what’s already being done in our communities. On the basis of this, we decided that it would be good if we could begin to build a directory of alternative Sheffield services and projects which could bring students into their communities, and could help students in times of need.

A similar project is already being done by Alt Sheff. However, our idea is that this could go towards making the Free University a reality, by including all aspects of University life: housing, transport, education, study space, libraries, entertainment and so on. This way we can begin to build an infrastructure for a free university which is informal, decentralised and brings lots of people in their communities together.

We also discussed how it would be good to host skills workshops, and set up “alerts” for lectures, so members of the public can attend lectures at Sheffield Hallam and the University of Sheffield without paying extortionate tuition fees.

This time around we will be creating a map of these alternative projects, and we will also discuss how we can continue to build on these alternatives. There will also be a short workshop on consensus decision-making. For the “Seeds for Change” briefing on consensus, click here.  You can find a PDF of the full book in our Library.

In the meantime we’ve created a blank Google Doc for people to add the projects they already know are happening, in preparation for mapping them next week. It might be good to organise them under the headings “Housing”, “Entertainment”, “Study Space”, “Education” and so on, so that we can start to see what a real Free University of Sheffield might look like! Click here for the Google Doc.

We also have some articles to read before next time, which will hopefully give some food for thought about building on our alternatives and what we might be building towards! These are:

Kate Aronoff, ‘Have Reports of the Death of Capitalism Been Greatly Exaggerated?‘; and

Jonathan Blitzer, ‘In Spain, Politics via Reddit‘.

As ever, if you want to suggest a reading for the group, just email it to us (freeunisheff[at]gmail.com) and we’ll send it straight back out.

If you want to join the mailing list, just send us an email asking to be added.

Here are some lessons from activism which have been sent in by some of our members.  It would be good to read these and think through them before our next soup seminar on Thursday 23rd July.  They have been made anonymous for the safety and security of our members.

The stories will be updated as more are sent in.

• My perspective is from being around activism from a young age – my parents were both activists in London from the late sixties through to the noughties. We had meetings at our home regularly – so much so that we used to play games as kids where we would hand out agendas and take minutes, print pamphlets etc. My impression of those days is that decision making was very hierarchical – the ‘troops’ were expected to vote for things occasionally and the rest of the time follow the party line. Heavily influenced by Soviet style communism and such like. Nowadays the scene in activist circles is much more progressive, there is a genuine commitment to non-hierarchical decision making and involvement of those traditionally sidelined. It’s easy to be disheartened that the revolution isn’t happening this week – and overlook the real progress that’s been made. Now it’s standard practice to have a safe space policy, to actively seek to include all voices, to watch out for power dynamics and work to try to flatten them. It’s not the answer to everything, but it does maximise the power of the group and ensure that it doesn’t become self-serving but carries on focusing on the real issues of the members.

• I think I had two things to say when we went round the circle. The first was about what little I’ve learnt from being involved with pragmatic mutual aid organisations. Active groups that are horizontally-organised, autonomous, and have a shared understanding of a goal they seek to work towards have been profoundly successful in allowing people to identify, parse, and articulate their own needs. If groups create spaces where individuals feel free and empowered to subsequently find ways to meet those needs, then those spaces draw others, and also retain people who seek to empower others as they themselves were empowered; this has beneficial consequences for group sustainability. There are risks in this approach: that groups may be amorphous, may be coerced by particularly charismatic figures, or may allow people to pursue needs that contradict each other. But there are benefits too: creating a notional space where people are free to seek out shared co-operative strategies for meeting needs (educational, I guess, in the context you’re talking about) that cannot be met in the choking miasma of late capitalism’s socioeconomic clusterfuck is a strategy of redemption and about reclaiming a sense of human idealism. The second thing I said when we went round the circle was the importance of challenging Capital’s lie about “it’s always been this way, and it always has to be this way”. Educational Hegemony wants you to think that its way of doing this is the only way of doing things: this is one of the many ways it seeks to brook no alternatives, to allow no space even for other ways of learning to be conceived. But in Sheffield (as is the case in several industrial cities) there is a strong heritage of working class autodidacticism, in Friendly Societies, Free Schools, Mechanics Institutes, continuing right through to the later c.20th when despite the Conservative’s best efforts to gut the Ad Ed system, there still survived the proud traditions of WEAs and Continuing Education (both within and without the walls of the academe). If you seek other ways of learning, of other means of knowledge creation and dissemination beyond the horrorshow of the contemporary neoliberal HE sweatshop, there are other traditions to draw from that expose the claim that ‘this kind of learning is the only learning there can be’ as yet another dirty great fib.

The Free University of Sheffield is pleased to announce its third soup seminar at Union St!

We’ll be having our third ever soup seminar on Thursday, July 23rd at 6.30pm. In the soup seminars we come together to cook and eat food, and discuss how we can act to change society’s problems. We are creating a community of thinkers and activists to come together and work out constructive solutions to the problems we face today. (All food is vegan).

We have set out three principles of the soup seminars: (1) education must serve the needs of society, not the interests of the individual; (2) we cannot leave it up to academics or ‘experts’ to come up with ways to solve our problems – we are all experts; and (3) if we are going to change anything, we must study and act together.

If you want to be added to the mailing list for the soup seminars, please email freeunisheff[at]gmail.com with your name and email address.

A major theme of last week’s discussion was creating an alternative: activism should not just be about resisting something, or making demands of those in positions of authority, it should also be about trying to build alternative structures. One example that was given was the Black Panther Party: they did not merely resist white supremacy, they also built support networks and provided for their black communities, such as through their Free Breakfast for School Children Programme.

It was a really productive discussion, and it would be good to carry on the discussion in our third soup seminar. In a book called “Deschooling Society”, Ivan Illich proposes that we need to create alternative education systems which are decentralised and try to promote interaction, collaboration, creativity and fun. The Wikipedia page (click here) is a good starting point to give some ideas of what an alternative education system might look like. The ideas fit with our discussion of taking responsibility for ourselves and creating alternatives, and might be a good talking point for next week.  Click here for the PDF of Deschooling Society.

Other good things to read about would be the crèche that Plan C ran at the recent anti-austerity demonstration in London (for the article click here) and, of course, the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for School Children Programme (for an article on this click here). If you have suggestions for other articles, please send an article in to us! We’ll send it back out to the email list so everyone can read it in time for the next meeting. You can either email us at freeunisheff[at]gmail.com or message our Facebook page.

Perhaps some good questions to think about for next week would be:
– What sort of support programmes are needed today, in our own communities?
– What makes these support programmes so important? For example, are they important simply because they provide support (a bit like a charity), or are they important because the support they provide is clearly political? Or are there other reasons?
– How could we begin to build our own alternatives, and our own support systems?

Another important theme in the discussion last week was how important it is to focus on the day-to-day. We discussed how a lot of activism focuses on spectacular actions like marches through London, but often miss out the importance of trying to change how we interact on a day-to-day basis. This was linked into the discussion of building an alternative. In order to create an alternative, we need to know how it would work day in, day out! If you want to suggest articles for people to read on this subject, then please send them in!

If you have any questions, please email us or contact our Facebook page.