Festival 2025: Institutional Drift,
Value at the Threshold

As we move deeper into the 21st century, the crisis in education no longer needs announcing—it is now simply a boring vibe. Universities, once imagined as something other, are now little more than credentialing factories with branding strategies. Managerial logic, economic austerity, and the hollowing out of intellectual life have produced a kind of institutional auto-pilot: grey infrastructure for a world that no longer believes in anything, and values even less.

Within this terrain, we ask:

1.    What remains of the institution?
2.    How is ‘value’—cultural, intellectual, affective—produced and 
3.    perceived in its wake?

The second iteration of our Festival will be an unorthodox gathering of fragments and formats. It’ll be a space for public transmission, not dull formality. It’ll be for research that resists extraction, for knowledge and truths that aren’t easily audited. Across modes, participants will engage types of working that hover between institution and improvisation.

We welcome anyone that has ideas about the future of para-academia - educators without classrooms, researchers without grants, artists without audiences, and those building new architectures of meaning from the ruins of credentialed certainty.

Our festival is not necessarily about what education could be, should be or ought to be. It is a celebration of what we, despite our symbolic poverty, are already doing.


Early Announcements:

  • Brian Massumi on The Parainstitutional Imperative: Toward an Anarchism of Value
  • MSCP on Samuel Beckett’s poem Gnome
  • Dan Ross in conversation on how to think AI philosophically


12–14 December, 2025
Abbotsford Convent
RSVP here


Festival 2024: 
Festival 2024 copy to go here.

IMAGE TO GO HERE.

Watch the 2024 recordings.












Events

A Genocide Alphabet

This work is informed by our sense that the times call for minimalist
thinking concerning our ontological truth, the minimal truth of an absolute criminal being. For some time now, we (of the West / Europeans) are being called upon to give a frank account of ourselves by those who already know us infinitely more intensely than we may know ourselves, namely the sovereign peoples whose lands we continue to occupy. For the occupiers, to be as (self-)knowing through and in response this call is to receive the imperative, ‘Think with your being as fully exposed to our being.’ It is fundamentally to face the question, ‘You are the bearers of criminal being. Who are you?’ The book invites the reader to respond to this question by following the colonizing movement of modern western proprietary being and exposing the concealment of its criminality.
9th October, 2025, 6–8pm
MSCP
RSVP here




Ashpoems

These short poems are informed by a sense of a devastation in that the human face has been wiped from its places of emergence in history and love. They seek to acknowledge the depth of the catastrophe by re-posing the questions of language’s relationship, as memory and vision, to lost ideals and their deceased martyrs. This vein pursuit takes shape with rhythms seeking to highlight the erotic substrate of communication itself, through disruption of an ego-centric logic that involves whispering to dead words in the hope of making them speak to language. The mystery of language cannot be detected in its words.23rd October, 2025, 6–8pm
MSCP
RSVP here
Caption info to go here.











© FOPA 2025