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Child Woven: Tracing Liberated Futures of Learning
Research by Mayıs Rukel
2023, Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam
Supervised by belit sağ
 

"Liberate the child in order to liberate the future."
— Mayıs Rukel to Victoria McKenzie, during one of their conversations on radical pedagogies. Paris, 2023.

Mayıs Rukel and his sister on a miserable school morning. 2000, Ankara.

Child Woven is a research rooted in lived experience, grief work, and political commitment to decolonial dreaming. Through a poetic, embodied approach, Mayıs Rukel imagines liberated, abolitionist futures of learning where education becomes an act of freedom, as opposed to the normalisation of coercion. Unschooling, deschooling, radical pedagogies are called upon to reshape the ways in which we learn, teach and grow.

Child liberation is a prerequisite to abolition at large.

Child Woven proposes that a liberated world demands the end of capitalism’s reproduction through mass global education systems; systems that dissolve agency and cultivate obedience in each new generation. Where classism, gatekeeping, and abuse of power are introduced as necessary forms of discipline, schooling becomes the very site of injustice taught as inevitable. Severing humans from the intelligence of their bodies, from an embodied sense of safety, dignity, time, and belonging.

Learning that is deeply connected to justice,
active against the systemic injustices of
race, sex, body and class
Creating confident children
who are dedicated to shifting the course
of an oppressive world they inherited.

For a liberated future, the ways in which new generations learn, teach, and grow must be reimagined from the ground of care. Care as defined by the framework of Disability Justice: every single body is whole and worthy of a good life, no body is left behind. The changing needs of our bodies become foundational at every level of this new world-building.

So much grieving; because there is so much to grieve about how time, agency and sleep is stolen.
Do you remember how your body experienced the passing of time before schooling?
The magical, body-based experience of time in early childhood.
The presence of time.
The texture of it.

I have been through classrooms where
it was forbidden to drink water when thirsty,
or to use the bathroom when needed.
After the age 12, I have witnessed
friends suffering period pains
and anxiety of embarrassment,
forced to expose the reason for their need
in front of the entire class
and still be denied permission
to use the bathroom.


Our bodies not trusted.
Targeted, monitored, policed.


I have been scolded
for the length of my hair,
forced to cut it.
When I objected,
I read the regulations and guidelines,
finding no indication of a certain measure
the length of hair was limited to.
They didn’t even bother with something like:
“Hair cannot be longer than X centimetres.”
It only said
“The hair must be short and neat.”
It nauseated me to see
how much space they gave themselves
for the arbitrary exercising of their power.


Before I could embrace my newly growing beard,
experiment with its feel, texture, length,
experiment with where it is located in race,
gender, queerness,
I’ve been forced to shave millimetres of stubble
in the school toilet.

Monday mornings, lining up in the garden
of the high school in Ankara
to start the new week with the anthem,
words of which we were made to memorise since we were little:
“Our spilled blood, as the God-worshipping people we are,
The rest of the world is enemy to us, yet our nation shall prosper.”


Then one by one, walking past a line of teachers,
being called out of the line
for scolding and humiliation
in a space of confinement, sanitised from the diversity of life,
locked into a bad abstraction of life’s abundance.

​Core questions of Child Woven:

  • What is the harm embedded in institutionalised schooling?

  • What does liberatory learning look and feel like?

  • How can unschooling, deschooling, and community-based education restore joy, agency, and dignity in childhood?

  • What role does embodied knowledge play in reimagining education?

​

Main frameworks:

  • Black radical feminist thought (bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, adrienne maree brown)

  • Disability Justice and Embodied Social Justice (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ecologies of Transformation, Rae Johnson)

  • Unschooling and deschooling movements (Akilah S. Richards, John Holt)

  • Decolonial pedagogy and abolitionist education (bell hooks, Francisco Ferrer, Célestin Freinet, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal)

  • Intergenerational and interspecies knowledge-sharing (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Robin Wall Kimmerer)

For inquiries about the text, please email rukelfilm@gmail.com

​Bibliography, Lineage, Riverbeds

​​

  • Adrienne Rich, cited in 'Are You My Mother?' (2012) by Alison Bechdel.

  • Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader (2019) by R.H. Haworth and M. Bray

  • Black Parade (2020) by Beyoncé.

  • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants (2020) by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

  • Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

  • Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015) by Joy Harjo.

  • Discipline & Punish (1975) by Michel Foucault

  • Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups (2001) by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun.

  • Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (2003) by James van Horn Melton.

  • Emergent Strategy (2017) by adrienne maree brown.

  • Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America's Global Comic (2019) by Isabella Cosse.

  • Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia E. Butler.

  • Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000 print) by Paulo Freire.

  • Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019) by adrienne maree brown.

  • Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor (2021) by Alice Sparkly Kat.

  • Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work (2020) by Akilah S. Richards.

  • Rehearsals for Living (2022) by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard.

  • Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto (2022) by Tricia Hersey.

  • Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) by bell hooks.

  • The Evolution of the Formal Educational System and Its Relation to Economic Growth Policies in the First Turkish Republic (1974) by M. Tunç Özelli.

  • The GEN Grief Toolkit: Embodiment tools and rituals to support grief work in community (2022) authored and researched by Camille Barton.

  • The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House (2018 print) by Audre Lorde.

  • The Politics of Trauma: Somatics, Healing, and Social Justice (2019) by Staci K. Haines.

  • The Roots of Anti-Americanism in Turkey 1945-1960 (2015) by Tuba Ünlü.

  • The Roots of White Supremacy are in Our Bodies (2017) by Madelanne Rust-D'Eye.

  • The Whig Party and the Rise of Common Schools, 1837-1854 (2008) by Mark Groen.

  • Theatre of the Oppressed (1979) by Augusto Boal.

  • Trust Kids! Stories on Youth Autonomy and Confronting Adult Supremacy (2022) edited by carla joy bergman

  • Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

  • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978) by Audre Lorde.

  • ZONG! As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (2008) by M. NourbeSe Philip.

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