Why do you pick out education as a central theme?

First of all we want to try to understand ourselves why education or the model of the academy has recently become so attractive to numerous creative, activist and other practices which are taking it up as an enabling form.

There seems to be a variety of different reasons and motivations which in return produce a wide range of resulting effects. Instead of attempting to explain them or to rationalise them and thereby inevitably reducing such multiplicity to a certain degree which would allow to handle the questions, represent the output, and compare the results, SUMMIT is driven by the desire to increase the complexity of educational theories and practices.

We want to promote new, open and wider notions of "education" that are not limited to the work of institutions of higher education, that is more than knowledge transfer or training. We understand education as a creative practice that might occur elsewhere than expected places and might lead elsewhere than expected outcomes.

We also suppose that nowadays education has become an industry that is based on new forms of exploitation of affective and immaterial labour. The relations of production can be characterized by an increasing precariousness that again generates new forms of subjectivity that have only little to do with the traditional role models of the teacher and the student.

Rather than lamenting about a "crisis of education" or "precarity" we believe that a movement will gain momentum that questions and changes some of the fundamental terms of the debate around education, knowledge production and information society.