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@ -96,8 +96,12 @@ These below are some shared statements that emerged from the collective process
# On Making a Syllabus: technopolitical pedagogies
On the technological and technopolitical side, developing tools and workflows for syllabus is an extension of our work on the [Memory of the World](https://memoryoftheworld.org/) shadow library. As amateur librarians we want to provide a universal public access to a meticulously maintained catalogue of digital texts, making available those texts that are behind paywalls or are not digitised yet. (It is worth noting that shadow libraries themselves are a pirate care practice: in contravention of the copyright regulation, they are assisting readers across a highly unequal world of education and research.) With the tools and workflows for the syllabus we want to offer social movements a technological framework and pedagogical process that helps them transform their shared analysis of present confrontations and reflections on past mobilisations into a learning material that can be used to help others learn from their knowledge. The technological framework that we are developing should allow other similar movements to avail themselves of these syllabi freely in their own learning processes. But also to adapt them to their own situation and the groups they work with. We want that the syllabi can be easily preserved, that they include digitised documents relevant to the actions of these social movements, and that they come integrated with well-maintained and catalogued collections of reading materials. That means that we don’t want that they go defunct once the dependencies for that Wordpress installation get broken, that the links to resources lead to file-not-found pages or that adapting them requires a painstaking copy&paste process.
On the technological and technopolitical side, developing tools and workflows for syllabus is an extension of our work on the [Memory of the World](https://memoryoftheworld.org/) shadow library. As amateur librarians we want to provide a universal public access to a meticulously maintained catalogue of digital texts, making available those texts that are behind paywalls or are not digitised yet. (It is worth noting that shadow libraries themselves are a pirate care practice: in contravention of the copyright regulation, they are assisting readers across a highly unequal world of education and research.) With the tools and workflows for the syllabus we want to offer social movements a technological framework and pedagogical process that helps them transform their shared analysis of present confrontations and reflections on past mobilisations into a learning material that can be used to help others learn from their knowledge.
The technological framework that we are developing should allow other similar movements to avail themselves of these syllabi freely in their own learning processes. But also to adapt them to their own situation and the groups they work with. We want that the syllabi can be easily preserved, that they include digitised documents relevant to the actions of these social movements, and that they come integrated with well-maintained and catalogued collections of reading materials. That means that we don’t want that they go defunct once the dependencies for that Wordpress installation get broken, that the links to resources lead to file-not-found pages or that adapting them requires a painstaking copy&paste process.
To address these concerns, we have made certain technological choices. A syllabus in our framework is built from plaintext documents that are written in a very simple and human-readable [Markdown markup language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown), rendered into [a static HTML](https://www.getlektor.com/docs/what/) website that doesn’t require a resource-intensive and easily breakable database system, and which keeps its files on a [git version control system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control) that allows collaborative writing and easy forking to create new versions out of the existing syllabi. This makes it easy for a housing struggles initiative in Berlin to fork a syllabus which we have initially developed with a housing struggles initiative in London and adapt it to their own context and needs. Such a syllabus can be then equally hosted on an internet server and used/shared offline from a USB stick, while still preserving the internal links between the documents and the links to the texts in the accompanying searchable resource collection.
The Pirate Care Syllabus is the first syllabus that we’ll bring to a completion. It has provided us both with an opportunity to work with the practitioners to document a range of pirate care practices and with a process to develop the technological framework.
# Online Syllabi & Social Justice Movements
@ -113,8 +117,9 @@ Here is a few examples of such crowdsourced online syllabi:
- **#FERGUSONSYLLABUS**
In August 2014, Michael Brown, an 18 year old boy living in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson. Soon after this episode, as the civil protests denouncing police brutality and institutional racism begun to mount across the US, Dr. Marcia Chatelain, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at Georgetown University, launched an online call urging other academics and teachers 'to devote the first day of class to hold a conversation about Ferguson' and 'to recommend texts, collaborate on conversation starters, and inspire dialogue about some aspect of the Ferguson crisis’ (Chatelain, 2014). Chatelain did so using the hashtag #FergusonSyllabus.
- Chatelain, M. (2014). [“Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus.”](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus) Dissent Magazine, November 28.
- Chatelain, M. (2014b). [“How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson.”]( https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-about-whats-happening-in-ferguson/379049/) The Atlantic, August 25.
- Chatelain, M. (2014). [“Teaching the #FergusonSyllabus.”](https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/teaching-ferguson-syllabus) Dissent Magazine, November 28.
- Chatelain, M. (2014b). [“How to Teach Kids About What’s Happening in Ferguson.”]( https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/how-to-teach-kids-about-whats-happening-in-ferguson/379049/) The Atlantic, August 25.
- **GAMING AND FEMINISM SYLLABUS**
In August 2014, using the hashtag #gamergate to coordinate, groups of users on 4Chan, 8Chan, Twitter and Reddit instigated a misogynistic harassment campaign against game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, media critic Anita Sarkeesian, as well as a number of other female and feminist game producers, journalists and critics. In the following weeks, The New Inquiry editors and contributors compiled a reading list and issued a call for suggestions.