SoC Assembly 2026

The School of Commons Assembly 2026 unfolds within a moment of strain and transition. It follows a *Town Hall* titled Tensile Structures, which gathered our community under conditions of uncertainty, making visible both the fragility and the strength of what has been built together over the past nine years. As School of Commons faces the withdrawal of familiar institutional support, the questions that surface are no longer abstract: how do we hold each other, how do we stretch without tearing, how do we sustain collective structures when the ground beneath them is shifting? This Assembly does not ask how to escape pressure, but how to remain with it — together — with a sustained hope that something more aligned, nourishing, freeing, and supportive can be born without collapse.

If Tensile Structures names the condition, Making a Vessel in the Sky names the response. Drawing from the ISSUES metafesto and its image of the boat in the sky, the Assembly imagines collectivity not as something fixed or grounded, but as something brought into being through shared belief, care, and coordination. A vessel that exists because we insist on it. A structure made not of certainty, but of relation. Not a monument, but a practice.

The SoC Cohort 2025 can be understood in these terms: fourteen projects sustained not by sameness, but by productive tension between bodies, histories, tools, technologies, landscapes, and ways of knowing — redistributing weight as existing supports shift, stretch, or fall away. Knowledge moves not as property, but as something held in common, shared through games, radios, kitchens, rituals, mentoring relationships, and experimental infrastructures. Across the cohort programme, learning takes shape through layered spaces: commons, assemblies, platforms, and shared systems that expand participation without flattening difference or excluding those most affected.

Across the cohort, research unfolds within ecological, political, and epistemic precarity, asking what it means to remain connected without tearing, to stay responsive while under strain. Projects move across communities already living in and with crisis, drawing from cultures that have long practiced collective solutions to collective problems through mutual solidarities. Learning here is relational and situated — shaped through proximity, care, and collective responsibility rather than extraction or ownership.

Another current moves through archives, memory, and more-than-human relations. Projects reimagine the archive beyond Western epistemologies — towards oral traditions, embodied knowledge, ephemeral art, mourning rituals, and the body itself as a living archive of trauma and transformation. Others attend to food sovereignty, disappearing ecologies, and post-glacial landscapes as sites of learning and resistance. Queering methods and myth-making practices centre multiplicity, monstrosity, chimera, and more-than-human voices, opening narratives in which humans are no longer the only narrators.

Communication and translation emerge as tensile acts in themselves: how to speak across difference, how to say the same things in A2 English, how to make climate data accessible, how to foster inclusive education, how to activate accountability rather than neutrality. These are not secondary practices, but structural ones — ways of steering the vessel, ways of staying together while in motion. Taken together, the Assembly’s conversations, practices, and gatherings form a constellational structure under tension — stretched across geographies, disciplines, generations, and species, sustained through relation rather than stability. In doing so, they affirm School of Commons as a living, relational infrastructure: one that flexes, listens, and responds in a world that is still being pulled apart.

These questions of holding, imagining, and transmitting knowledge converge in the ISSUES Launch 2025: Exquisite Commons. Refusing linear sequence, the publication circulates, drifts, returns, disappears, and reappears — treating publication itself as a commoning practice, an open archive, a shared vessel for collective voice. Neither manifesto nor manual, it operates as a metafesto: an orientation device for navigating uncertainty together, an invitation rather than an instruction.

The Assembly is held between two moments both titled Tensile Structures: the Town Hall that opened this period of transition, and the Round Table that will close it, reconvening guest facilitators from the previous Assembly. Together, they stretch the structure across time, memory, and relation — linking past, present, and possible futures through shared attention and collective reflection. These moments echo the cohort’s inquiries and extend them across the Assembly’s shared spaces, inviting continuity, care, and renewed conversation as living forms of relation.

Together, the Town Hall, the cohort programme, the ISSUES launch, the Assembly, and the Round Table form a single relational structure: not a stable institution, but a roaming one; not a fixed framework, but a vessel in formation.A sky-boat held together by imagination, mutual dependency, care, humour, friction, and trust.

There is no single entry point.No first page.No fixed ground.

The moment you choose to step onto the vessel in the sky, you are already part of its making.

*Town Hall* now a core part of the SoC methodology — a shared space for collective reflection, accountability, and reorientation.