the guerrilla gradschool project

Winter 2025/26

Scholarship Proposal 

“I'm workin' on a song
It isn't finished yet
But when it's done and when I sing it
…Spring will come again”

~ Orpheus in Hadestown 

i have been chewing? 

I have spent a year and some change chasing a thread 

my spirit mumbles at me, it mumbles something its tongue is not mature enough to speak, something my ears are not mature enough to hear

I spent many, many months learning about and collecting resources that relate to a set of ideas that fall within the intersection of human cooperation and technology. Reviewing, reflecting and decent amounts of prayer have brought me to produce this document as an initial step towards what I hope to accomplish as a type of scholarship.

i am teasing out a map // and yet i already roam the road

Part of my practice will involve continuing to document my thoughts, my methods and activities, the material I consume, to iteratively uncover a pedagogic practice and curriculum that will be part of my final offering 

i become a poet-technologist-architect, a feeler, a healer in healing, a teacher-student, a lover, and in community, always, in community \

the guerrilla gradschool project: 

footnote: I use the term ‘guerrilla’ in a similar fashion to ‘guerilla gardinening’ or ‘guerilla theorizing’ to recall themes of independent (indie) initiatives, conscious disintegration and/or subversion of conventional paradigms, and alternative approaches to meet high-stress environmental constraints (low or non-standard resources, dynamic and urgent demands). 

‘guerrilla gradschooling’ represents a form of study and scholarship that develops outside of an institutionally defined path; it is a grassroots effort that is temporally unscoped, with non-linear progression, a flexible curriculum, decentralized community, and using unconventional practice and tactics towards a similar objective as a traditional academic program. i am proposing and testing a methodology of seeking and producing knowledge that deviates from standard academic practice. part of my aim will be to trace how exactly my process of study aligns with and separates from traditional institutionally aligned scholarship. for instance, i plan to incorporate reliable forms of peer-review into my work, and to have a rigorous citation and bibliography practice . on the other hand, a key element will also be amorphous and asynchronous forms of ‘coursework’ in which the syllabus is in constant evolution, and discussion of the material happening over diverse sets of communities and settings.

this pursuit holds at its core the hunch that perhaps an alternative approach to scholarship or academics  is more effective for certain communities, certain ends or in certain environments. what forms of community might develop around this approach to scholarship? what will the knowledge produced look like? what institutions and communities, if any, will the work produced be accountable to? how will a student of this practice evolve? what is the imprint or sediment learning leaves behind in me?  what are the ways I could communicate that to my environment, or how can my learning co-evolve with my environment? what does it mean to incorporate study and scholarship into my life? what would it look like when it is not institutionally aligned (or when the institution it is aligned to is this body and spirit with what it is called to and what brings it alive)? 

my hope is that this approach to study allows for learning that is more intimately paired with practical contexts, that my academic pursuits evolve in a way that is relevant to the demands of my immediate environment, and that i experiment with ways to integrate my academic journey more seamlessly into my social, economic, spiritual and creative life. 

scope: 

the overarching question i hope to explore is the following: how can we create, grow and govern commons at scale and over a widely distributed scope, and use it to power polycentric initiatives to address a range of social issues in a cooperative way? 

through this exploration i also hope to touch on the following: 

• what does it mean to be a subject within a system and try to affect change? 
• what do truly democratic structures look like? 
• what is the place of technology in the movement towards a just world? how might technology enable the collaboration, the management, maintenance, and gathering of resources required in the movement towards a just world? 
• how can technology affect cooperative/collective behavior and how can cooperative/collective  behavior affect technology?
• how can institutions built on cooperative principles scale? across a decentralized network?
• how are forms of knowledge production linked to the application or presence of produced knowledge in lived realities?  (how can modes of knowledge production be linked to infrastructural and institutional change?) 

at the moment of writing this document, i am classifying this project under the scope of Digital Humanities. it is an analysis of the role and potential of digital tools and platforms in areas like commons production and governance, cooperative and non-hierarchical institutions within the economy, and knowledge production and sharing at scale. the work I produce will be my contribution to the digital commons. 

thesis Project 

i hope to organize different activities and produce a range of artefacts throughout my study of particular scopes of subjects (See coursework below). these may take the form of articles, essays, technical review and design documents, enhanced bibliographies, creative writing and other forms of exploratory artwork, as well as reports and archives of reading groups, workshops or salons i might host. these works will be organized and collated under the broad theme outlined by the questions i aim to explore, and hopefully, in time, can be woven and synthesized  into a particular story, idea or claim. 

my main aim is to produce a knowledge repository as a form of digital commons that is easily and effectively navigable, flexible in how it can be applied, and can be collaboratively developed further. this will include in part material I create through my own learning journey, but also will largely be an extensive documentation and cataloguing of all the resources (people, ideas, documents, projects, organizations, etc…) that relate to the questions i am exploring. 

the project will also of course produce a methodology and curriculum of study, the success of which will be measured by the extent of the positive change it produces in me, the quality of the communication it inspires with my communities, and the relevance of the tools and resources that are created through it. 

my coursework (subject and beholden to change) :

TODO: collect resources, and contacts/collaborators for each (e.g. relevant books, articles I’ve collected, individuals and organizations that I’ve connected with) 

1. gg1 - principles and case studies in the Solidarity Economy

Study: 

• Platform Cooperatives 
• Cooperatively Owned/Managed essential and commercial services (education, housing, transportation) 
• Mutual Aid (including digital communities) 
• Legal structures and government/public support 
• Practices/learnings on governing above, Pros/Cons 

Produce: 

• Book Reviews 
• Lit Reviews 
• Case Study Writeups 
• Interviews (members/leaders of initiatives)
• Experience/Implementation (actually work to incubate various cooperative initiatives) 

2.  gg2 - methodologies and architectures of decentralized governance 

Study: 

• Commons governance theories/Comedy of the Commons - across history and geographies 
• Polycentrism and Anarchism
• Systems Thinking/Emergent Organization
• Commons-based Peer Production (analysis of existing modalities) 
  • Open Source Software 
  • Scientific Knowledge 
  • Common Law 
  • Wikimedia 

Produce: 

• Articles/essays 
• Host salons and workshops 
• Speculative utopic creative and collective imagination projects - short stories, zines, art 

3. gg3 - technologies of cooperation and decentralized governance 

Study: 

• Federation and the Fediverse , blacksky
• Software for collaboration (e.g. Version Control System)
• Software leveraging Peer-to-Peer networking (e.g. BitTorrent) 
• Digital/Technology Commons 
• Web3, Blockchain and DAOs

Produce: 

• Lit reviews
• Software reviews 
• Technical papers 
• Architectural diagrams, design propositions 
• Organize hackathons to create/improve technology commons 

4. gg4 - methods and tools in knowledge management and information architecture 

Study: 

• Methods of cataloguing, indexing, linking 
• Knowledge and information modeling languages and tools for repositories 
• Theories of information architecture 
• Overview of tools and practices in knowledge and information modeling and management 

Produce: 

• Documentation and cataloguing of curriculum and related resources