Paper short abstract:

A transactional framework offers opportunities to re-examine anthropological/educational practices. Through playful engagement with the visual and sounded imaginations of future citizens in Amsterdam Zuidoost, we learn from alternative but always present practices of belonging and coexistence.

Paper long abstract:

In the most commonly shared understanding, schools are spaces in which both the reproduction of social norms and the shaping of critical future citizens is supposed to take place. This common construction of the school is premised on selfactional and interactional frames of analyses. Therein, as an anthropologist, one cannot but focus on the social reproduction of inequalities and exclusionary politics of belonging.

A transactional framework, based on the relational poetics of Eduoard Glissant and the pragmatic imaginations of John Dewey, challenges the social researcher to also conceive of the school as scholae, based on the Greek schoolè, meaning free or un-destined time (Masschelein). Freetime is the space between the actual and the possible, more than anything, it is the space of imagination. Following Ingold, who intricately relates anthropology to education, the chosen framework prompts us to work with and within this space.

In this presentation/paper we ask you to engage with our innovative research conducted with primary school children in Zuidoost, a superdiverse neighborhood in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The pupils were invited to use and relate to existing images and sounds from their school surroundings and the internet. They were also encouraged to create new images and sounds, using both analogue and digital apparatus. The created space of scholae allowed for us to learn from the ways children imagine ethical ways of belonging and coexisting. These do not replace institutionally backed dispositions of "us and them making", but strengthen the deconstructive tendencies always and already at play.