DATA OF INTEREST

GUEST:
Karim-Yassin Goessinger

HOST:
Juliana Rabelo


Synopsis:

Karim-Yassin shares his experience as founder and educator at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS) through different metaphors: the “pigeon tower”, a sailboat, eating and practices related to the body.

What do pigeons have to do with education? The metaphor of the pigeon tower is opposed to the metaphor of the ivory tower in three dimensions:


Leaving behind individualism in education to enter into a collective method for research and learning.

Drawing our attention to materiality.

The relationship between theoretical and abstract intelligence in everyday life. Pigeons eat and then fertilize just like students learn and then share what they have learned in their everyday life. The pigeon tower represents the intermediate level between these two planes.

Pigeons can teach us about non-hierarchical choreography. What enables them to move like this is that they have a notion of others. The focus is on listening and coexistence.

Higher education centers should open up and enter into contact with their neighborhoods, their neighbors and daily life. Poetic language invites us to reimagine forms and figures. It's no longer a question of reforming higher education but rather reimagining it and radically transforming it.

The other metaphor that Karim shares with us is that of the sailboats on the Nile that teach us patience and coexistence. Life continues to be a trip on a sailboat beyond education at the institute.

It is important to combine philosophical investigation with poetic investigation because an investigation that is too logical remains closed in, while poetry invites us to play and open up.

Karim conceives of education as a feminist space of care in the sense of affection, healing accompanied by the principles of generosity, humility, compassion, radical equality, intimacy, recognizing the production of knowledge as something limited.

CILAS also places importance on deceleration because the reproduction of violence is related to velocity. There is an erotic/performative element to education. Education is an accompaniment, the educator has the habit of asking good questions and distinguishing even better questions.

Discussion-based learning as a method at CILAS is based on the interpretation of the word in Arabic that means to sculpt or to embellish. The method is divided into various types of discussion: the pre-discussion, which is more intuitive, vivid, memory-based, and another in which references, texts, podcasts, movies are introduced, which is the post-discussion. During the first part the collective agrees to the questions they are going to discuss/honor during the week, then they take a break, come back with conclusions and new questions and in this way configure virtuoso research cycles.

The idea is to find everyday tactics for survival as constant acts of co-creation. Strategies are considered a luxury and daily life becomes more important because there are constant changes to laws that have to do with civil society and vigilance within a repressive context. One must find languages that understand one another in a subculture or group of people that do not follow the conventions of society. For Karim the decolonial paradox is the urgency of deceleration.


Bio:

Karim-Yassin Goessinger is an educator and academic activist. He founded the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS) in 2013. As an educator, Karim-Yassin combines his education in philosophy and urbanism with the practice of Qi Gong, tea and cooking. He currently hosts a course on the promises and limitations of modern/colonial science in CILAS, Alexandria, Egypt.

VIDEO

And if We let the pigeons teach Us?

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