Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches the self-organised network of solidarity schools in Greece as infrastructure of both solidarity and education. It examines how urban communities assert their right to education by infrastructuring participatory modes of education, decision making and, effectively, commoning.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we examine the infrastructural qualities of self-organised educational solidarity entities that appeared in Greece in the last ten years. We do so in a twofold way. First we examine them as infrastructure of solidarity. As enablers of social participation, mutualism and commoning which while aim to meet immediate educational needs they also generate (and infrastructure) new affects, settings and processes of belonging and grassroots democracy. Secondly, by delving more on their transfigurative dimension, we approach the solidarity schools as emerging modes of educational infrastructure. We examine how the provision of education in a self-organised solidarity context affects the embedded sociality, structures, means, spaces, pedagogy and concept of education per se.

By focusing on a particular solidarity school and on the operation of the nation-wide Solidarity Schools’ Network, we approach them as infrastructural assemblages that function in multiple scales and societal fields, which:

a. reveal the socio-material fabric of the educational process – in all its complexity- and

b. open up the notion of education (and pedagogy) beyond the classroom and a teacher – student relationship; to include the agencies (needs, resources, knowledge, sociality, values and vision) of the wider community around them.

In this regard, we argue, the solidarity schools engage effectively in collective practices of infrastructuring (the means and processes of) a different mode of education. In other words, they emerge as a prototype by which urban communities assert their right to infrastructure, while they generate participatory forms of educational infrastructure and processes of commoning.