Struggles for Living Learning- Lina Dokuzovic
Excerpts:
….Lokavidya can be understood as
a lived/living knowledge which develops from day-to-day experiences,
struggles, and challenges in the world as a people’s common
knowledge: a living knowledge or living learning. It includes the knowledge of peasants,
artisans, displaced persons, and indigenous persons alongside
institutionalized education or other spaces where knowledge is
produced. According to members of the movement, it is a term that,
while coined by participants in the movement, is easily understood
and identified by people across India as something they inherently
have….
“if we see this in a deprivation
framework, we will be led to development theories; if we see this in
an exploitation framework, we will be led to theories of radical
social transformation” …..This perspective, which highlights the
detrimental consequences of “development” advanced by not least
the World Bank or IMF, is key to understanding the point of departure
of the LJA. In other words, a struggle which focuses on lack advances
financial compensation as its endgame, thus remaining dependent on
national and supranational policies that oppress impoverished
populations through the very logic of standards-based definitions of
lack. It also perpetuates competition among its people. However, by
shifting the perception of lack and accompanying jealousy,
depression, and insecurity perpetuated by the logic of capital to
highlighting what people are endowed with, despite, or even as a
result of these experiences, people can become empowered through the
collective use and exchange of their skills, talents, and knowledge.
The LJA departs from this shift in the perception of knowledge
production by instead placing lokavidya at the center of a unified
struggle in order to radically reconfigure the understanding of
knowledge, development, solidarity, borders, and access. From this
perspective, the LJA attempts to unitea wide range of struggles for
socially equitable access to basic human rights.
Lokavidya provides a crucial perspective in India where a large part
of the population has been made refugees in their homeland as a
result of displacement and internal migration. In this context,
knowledge is not only quantified for becoming commodified; it is also
instrumentalized to promote processes of exclusion beyond the realm
of education or employment within cognitive capitalism. Furthermore,
lokavidya presents an important alternative within the context of
grassroots movements that have reached an impasse in historical and
contemporary conflicts between armedstruggle and abandoned non-violent Gandhism. However, the notion of
lokavidya not only presents an alternative. By departing from the
perspective of capacity rather than lack, it builds a greater
foundation for a struggle built and inherently based on constituent
strengths. It, therefore, allows for more flexible solidarity across
borders or facets of struggle as it focuses less on competition among
have-nots by reinforcing itself instead through a strengthening,
self-empowering, and self-perpetuating exchange of shared knowledges
as capacity and potentiality. Due to the potentiality ofthis perspective, the LJA and Vidya Ashram maintain that “a radical
intervention in the world of knowledge is a necessary condition for a
radical transformation of society.”
The notion of lokavidya has deeply enriched my theoretical and
political understanding of the role of knowledge as a constituent and
instituent force across borders, economic sectors, institutions of
education, and thus as a transformative form of cross-sectional
solidarity. My understanding of lokavidya as a theoretical
perspective was significantly developed through practical, lived
experiences and encounters with movements, primarily the LJA. And my
understanding of movement practices was further expanded through a
variety of theoretical viewpoints from struggles, including contrapoder, radical pedagogy, co-research,
translocality, feminist ecology, or social justice.
...movements such as the LJA use phrases like “living knowledge,”
“living learning,” or “people’s knowledge” instead to refer
to a state of empowerment, not a new form of exploitation. In doing
so,they radically shift their approach to these exploitative conditions
by not allowing them to paralyze their actions. Instead, the LJA
focuses on the constituent force or counter-power of lived
experiences, which in many cases includes traditional, Indigenous, or
Fordist structures that function parallel to Postfordist cognitive
capitalism in, for example, the context of India.
Movements such as the LJA have taken this one step further to claim
that lived knowledge
should be placed at the center of knowledge-based struggles as the
source of self-empowerment and the basis upon which to demand rights
and reclaim space.
This point of departure has been expanded through perspectives
developed within the LJA – as well as its overlaps with the
publication Living Learning – which demand an inclusion of lived
knowledges, placing the worst-off at the center of a common struggle,
and placing lokavidya at the center of a more comprehensive struggle
for rights.
LJA’s demands for basic income are based on the egalitarian
acknowledgement and treatment of knowledges (i.e., lokavidya). This
perspective – which contributes greatly to the notion of living
learning – does not measure knowledge according to its value on
global financial markets. It instead understands knowledge as a
fundamental part of life and considers the exploitation of living
labor within and beyond financial or cognitive capitalism. Living
learning also acknowledges the various translocal differences in and divisions of labor that influence and
are influenced by transforming economic and social relations.
Furthermore, living learning incorporates an understanding of the
gender divide and feminization of labor. It does not create an
exclusive perspective that disregards the global digital divide or
the global multiplication of labor.
An equally distributed unconditional basic income based on an equal
acknowledgement of human knowledges and their various contributions
to society – rather than cognitive capital – would satisfy
demands by struggles for living learning in different parts of the
world without the loss of livelihoods that fuels destructive
capitalist expansion. Moreover, the distribution of such a notion on
a global level would challenge global divisions of labor and income
disparity and would create a radical shift in global economic processes and translocal practices
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The book can be purchased or ordered from all book stores in the
German-speaking area. It can also be ordered online from a number of
distributors who ship internationally. In addition, a downloadable
pdf is also available on the publisher's website at the link pasted
below.
Living Learning: Within Emergent Knowledge Economies and the Cognitivization of Capital and Movement.
transversal texts, June 2016
ISBN 978-3-903046-09-2
237 pages, paperback, € 15,00
The book is available in print or as an EPUB or PDF.
http://transversal.at/books/li
Living Learning: Within Emergent Knowledge Economies and the Cognitivization of Capital and Movement.
transversal texts, June 2016
ISBN 978-3-903046-09-2
237 pages, paperback, € 15,00
The book is available in print or as an EPUB or PDF.
http://transversal.at/books/li
Some useful links to the author’s involvement with LJA
Lina Dokuzovic speaking at the First International Conference of
Lokavidya Jan Andolan
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