From here to there to a failing tomorrow

What if the present we live in today were a premeditated, calculated, failed future? What if failure were built into the systems we move through? Into the timelines we’re measured against? This study group begins in the past. It approaches the failures of today and tomorrow in retrospect, inviting participants to become investigators and wanderers of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies. Short excerpts from the book act as a spring board to explore an indigenous perspective of a decolonial present, studying the concepts of time, history, progress, and failure to create a narrative built on shared experiences and conversation.

The texts will act as a point of departure, not as frameworks to follow, but something to move through and against. Each reading will open into discussion, observation, and reflection, shifting between Smith’s critiques and the current inhabited conditions. A parallel will be drawn with the participants’ own practices, projects, and everyday engagements as valid sources of knowledge, not examples; asking how research becomes authority, how history becomes singular, and how both continue to define what is seen as valid, complete, or worth preserving. From there, the group will attempt to locate these structures within the immediate surroundings, tracing how they shape the social, cultural, and institutional realities one navigates in and around Amman today. These conversations will be accompanied by simple, hands-on exercises that respond to both Smith’s critiques and local contexts.

Curious thinkers, artists, practitioners, educators, and none of the above are welcome to apply to these sessions. This study group is not a space for resolution or polished conclusions; it is, instead, a space to question and imagine.

Applications are due by April 30th, 2026