Dear all
My name is Karim-Yassin Goessinger. Of Austro-Egyptian origin, I founded and have served as founding director and teaching fellow at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences CILAS – a floating micro-liberal arts college situated in Fatimid Cairo – since 2013. On the side, I offer courses in classical and contemporary sociology at the American University in Cairo.
Recent talks I’ve given and which could give you a sense of my inquiries were at a critical geography conference in Ramallah on the global emergence of liberal arts educations in relation to space; on aesthetic education and the importance of play (grounds) at the Dutch Institute in Cairo; and on the task of the liberal educator at a conference on liberal education at the University of Chicago. A writing project I’ve been working on with five scholarly friends introduces the notion of a pigeon tower as a metaphor to guide us in our efforts to re-envision higher education.
I wish to tell you here a bit about CILAS: a scholarly cooperative guided by the principles of play, intimacy, ignorance, trans-disciplinarity and diversity CILAS was conceived of after a mostly joyous academic training in political philosophy, social anthropology and urban sociology and a predominantly disillusioning professional experience with so-called development cooperation.
I suppose my work with CILAS could be summed up in two steps. The first step is to cater food for thought either to those left undernourished by the traditional (read modern/colonial) university, to people denied access to university altogether or to those who refuse to “waste time” at a traditional university. The second step is to provide shelter in a neighbourhood to make it effectively accessible to people from different walks of life to assemble around a meal (a range of topics) and eat together (contemplate, think and co-create knowledge).
I created CILAS – first and foremost as a liberal arts-focused space – in appreciation of the tradition of the liberal arts which I was fortunate to have access to; and out of a sense of responsibility stemming from a sense of belonging to the Egyptian people in their entirety, beyond the confines of class and citizenship. CILAS has been inviting students on ten-month long faluka (an ancient Egyptian sail boat) rides; hence, the image of the faluka as portrayed in CILAS’ logo. In other words, CILAS has been inviting students to engage with the liberal arts under a pedagogy of discovery.
The liberal arts are tricky to wrap up in one bundle. It’s, however, precisely this un-wrappability or un-packageability that helps the liberal arts escape turning into a consumer product. It therefore goes without saying that an invitation to engage with the liberal arts is one that must operate within a pedagogy of discovery as opposed to the pedagogy of consumption that is becoming common currency in light of the corporatization of higher education. The metaphor of the faluka still resonates with when conceiving of CILAS, as I hastened to leave the so-called development world behind which had felt much too blatantly like a neo-colonial voyage on a cruise ship. This is how, together with E.F. Schumacher, I embraced the beauty of smallness and was drawn into sailing along the Nile rather than contributing to the command of yet another colonial voyage.
The mission statement as first formulated for CILAS was to offer students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds access to a liberal arts education. The vision, as first articulated, was to co-create a learning environment that would be conducive to critical inquiry, self-reflection and civic engagement. The immediacy of this statement served as a reminder of the social solidarity that had crystallised as part of the revolutionary momentum of the times. The vision was an implicit call for action to re-appropriate space in an effort to honour the generative force released during that revolutionary moment. Both the statement and vision played on the idea of grounding the liberal arts; of transforming them from something remote, mistakenly vague, void of instrumental value, liberal – carrying as it did a vilified connotation in Egypt’s post-revolutionary, politicised climate – into something, well, artsy, that is, generating no practical, i.e. monetary, outcome.
So much for step one. With regards to step two, it occurred to me that the January 25th revolution had brought formation of reading circles and discussion groups that covered a wide array of topics relating to the potentials of the historical juncture presenting itself to Egypt’s youth. What I noticed at the time is that many of the initiatives often came to an abrupt end within one to three months. I felt that an inviting and warm space paired with a loose program structure could do the trick in enticing eager learners to pull through despite the lack of formal recognition (accreditation).
Indeed, the loose structure consisting of a fairly intense core curriculum and thematic coursework that would respond to students’ concerns and questions struck the balance between intellectually challenging and imposed, and intellectually intriguing and self-directed. It is this balance that I think about most these days and that I find captured in the notion of play (properly understood!) and the metaphor of the pigeon tower, as I’d like to think of it.
I shall say a bit more soon …
Thank you for reading and for your questions and comments.
With best wishes
Karim-Yassin