Learning and Unlearning began as a series of discussions held from 2017-19 at Art in General. Throughout the discussions and the volume, we ask questions about the relationship between alternative pedagogies and world-making. By unlearning our relationship to the places and temporalities we occupy, can we learn new ways of inhabiting the world? And by reconsidering our relation to work and well-being, can we find new ways to see, feel and understand the world? This recalibration of how we see the world and consequently how we live our lives is the central concern of the artists, educators and thinkers whose writings follow.
Unlearning, for us, is not a reactionary opposition to intellectualism and the academy. While learning is a broad category that includes the basic transmission of information and skills, we use the word unlearning to describe approaches to learning that bring into question the norms that structure learning itself. It is to fundamentally rethink, and thus transform, how we critically engage with the world while remaining open to the differences that shape it. Unlearning is to question not only what must be learned, but also how and from whom. - Shifter Magazine