Dear friends,
I return to School of Instituting Otherwise—an institution that was seeded in 2017 as a place of learning that uses study as a radical tool for building the liberated worlds we often imagine. This comes after a hiatus of 3 years, in a time when learning is collapsing.
Be it in genocide or occupation, apartheid or ethnic cleansing, we continue to witness the deliberate destruction of schools, libraries, banning of books and state sanctioned inaccessibility of archives. The scholasticide in both blatant and insidious ways makes clear that knowledge is not incidental but targeted, because it holds memory, possibility, and futures.
Across three decades of moving through institutions, I have watched them unravel. Sometimes under the weight of capital and bureaucracy, but just as often in progressive spaces that couldn’t sustain themselves. Not from lack of ideals, but from the everyday difficulties of practicing them, of sharing power, of holding relationships, of imagining how to endure.
Technology has reshaped this terrain. The same infrastructures that let us connect have enabled propaganda, surveillance, even genocide. AI is here to stay, but the question is how we inhabit it—what else we build with it, around it, despite it. IO insists that while tools change, what matters is the ecology of relationships that not just enable knowledge creation but its free movement, too.
The school re-emerges with these lessons in mind: that the challenges of sustainability are not just confined to the questions of the financial “model” but they also have to do with cooperation that is as human as it’s institutional. And not just strive for building practices that can breathe and last, but to bridge the silos into common ground, common cause.
a gathering of university students in Delhi in 2019
School of IO seeks to build partnerships across art, culture, media and education—working with institutions, collectives, and individuals who share our commitment to learning, preservation, and imagination. Through courses, workshops, and collaborative projects, we aim to create spaces for critical inquiry, creative practice, and the exchange of knowledge across geographies and disciplines.
In the coming months, we will announce our first series of courses and workshops, marking the next chapter in this growing network of learning and collaboration.
And it is here that I want to be clear: this return is not about spectacle, slogans, or the rigid certainties that so often stifle us. What matters is the everyday—the conversations that hold, the stories told in small rooms, the gestures that refuse erasure not through display but through perseverance.
For now, I invite you to join me in the return to these fragile, persistent ways we build institutions otherwise.
In solidarity,
Meenakshi
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