Workshop
#Transmitting: Workshop
Saturday, Sep 4
8am–4pm EEST (Rafah)
Various locations in Rafah
Workshop, with registration
“Mujaawarah” as Liberatory Education
With Maree Bashir
“Mujaawarah” means the state or act of being a neighbor to another person. In response to the dire political and educational conditions in Gaza, self-directed community learning groups have formed within families, groups of neighbors, friends, partners and colleagues. These “mujaawaraat” (singular “mujaawarah”) come together spontaneously and autonomously and without direction by external structures. At once both home and school, they offer a space for lifelong learning. Participants in a mujaawarah choose to live, work and relate to one another in a spatial and temporal environment that centers dialogue, social contact, learning and mutual solidarity.
In this workshop, participants will experiment with the concept of a mujaawaraat as a liberatory structural action, a refuge and a model for autonomous community learning. Together with contributors who launched their own social or cultural initiatives based on the experience or draw upon it as a source of hope, they will create their own mujaawarah, engage within the local community, cook together and consider the potential of this act for building social connections and opening up new horizons.