Schizzi

from Italian schizzo, from schizzare ‘make a sketch’ or splash….

“Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric…You have to open up words, break things open, to free earth’s vectors.” Gilles Deleuze

A Speculative Field Guide for Radical Learners in a Time of Planetary Unravelling

(from Nomadic Learners and Rhizomatic Universities)

1. Prologue: A Letter from the Future

To the Radical Learner, Wherever You Are—

The year is uncertain. Clocks dissolved when the oceans rose. Calendars fluttered away with the last migration of printed things.

We write to you from within a world rewilding itself, through breakdowns and breakthroughs, compost and collapse.

You are not lost. You are becoming.

This guide is not a map, or not as one we might have known. It is a companion, a swarm, a whispering archive from those who walked, crawled, flew, and rooted before you.

You are not alone.

—The Nomadic Detective Agency

2. Field Conditions: What Are We Learning For, Now?

In the ruins of the Anthropocene, “education” has come undone. The lecture hall has crumbled; the syllabus has been devoured by fungi. The certainties we once taught, Progress, Mastery, Employment, no longer hold.

Radical learning now begins in the rubble. It listens to the wind, translates birdcalls, reads patterns in ash and moss. It asks:

• How do we learn when the world is unmaking itself?
• What forms of knowing help us stay with the trouble?
• Who—and what—counts as a learner?

We study not to dominate the world, but to be in kinship with it. We become feral scholars, epistemological trespassers. We decolonise not only the curriculum, but the idea of curriculum itself.

3. Equipment for a Nomadic Education

What do radical learners carry?

☐ A compass that always points to the most difficult question
☐ A notebook made of recycled policies
☐ An archive of silenced voices (some in languages no longer spoken)
☐ Seeds (literal and metaphorical)
☐ A torch made from glowing fungi
☐ A sense of humour (often mistaken for resistance)

This is not a survival kit. It is a becoming-kit. Each item shapeshifts according to need. The longer you carry them, the stranger and more familiar they become.

4. Encounters in the Ruins: Case Studies and Fictions

Case Study 1: The Learning Fungi Cooperative
Deep beneath the derelict business school, mycelial networks taught financial literacy through resource sharing and decomposing debt. Students were expected to spore.

Case Study 2: The Weather University
Tuition was paid in rainwater. Seminars occurred only during storms. One graduate was struck by lightning and now teaches lightning as praxis.

Case Study 3: The Institute for Translational Entanglement
Learners studied entanglement theory by weaving wool with worms. An octopus became Dean.

These are not parables. They are documents retrieved from trans-temporal research nodes. Their veracity is irrelevant. Their effects are real.

Case Study 1: The Learning Fungi Cooperative

Location: Beneath the Hollowed-Out Shell of a Global Finance School
Founded: During the Third Economic Composting
Pedagogical Model: Mycelial Mutualism

When the markets collapsed for the final time, the marble atrium of the business school cracked. Beneath it, something older stirred. From the rubble and rotted case studies, spores bloomed. That was the beginning.

The Learning Fungi Cooperative formed when a group of post-capitalist learners chose to live underground, not to hide, but to learn with decomposition. Financial literacy was redefined: no longer a language of extraction, but of interdependence, decay, and redistribution.

Lessons were taught via mycelial relay. Students embedded themselves into fungal networks and received transmissions not in words, but in sensations, moisture gradients, nutrient pulses, delayed reciprocity. There were no fees. Instead, students were expected to spore: to generate new learning offshoots, infect old institutions with new pedagogies, and cultivate unseen connections.

Lectures took the form of composting circles, where debt, personal, historical, ecological, was ritually broken down. Bonds were made literal, then broken down again. “Value” was measured in what could be regrown from collapse.

One famous dissertation was simply a log left in a darkened room, slowly overtaken by oyster mushrooms. It was awarded full distinction.

Case Study 2: The Weather University

Location: Atmospheric (always on the move)
Founded: After the Fifth Flood
Pedagogical Model: Climatic Co-learning

There is no campus. There is no timetable. The Weather University emerges only in meteorological convergence. Learning is dictated by clouds, lightning, barometric pressure. Storms are the syllabi.

Seminars occur spontaneously: lightning becomes a thesis defence, fog a methodology lab, hailstones a critique session. There is a kind of poetry to the precarity—learners gather when conditions permit, improvising shelters and sharing thermal blankets alongside theories.

Tuition is paid in rainwater, fog harvests, and wind stories. Admission is by forecast: if you can read the skies, you are already enrolled.

The curriculum is unruly. Cloud formations are co-lectured by climate refugees and crows. Thunder interprets sonic archives of resistance. One graduate, famously struck by lightning, returned with a new pedagogical framework known as electro-epistemology: knowledge as sudden charge, as ecstatic interruption.

Degrees are etched in sand and erased with the tide. Only those who learned to track storms can trace them again.

Case Study 3: The Institute for Translational Entanglement

Location: A Knot in Time / Somewhere Between Language and Thread
Founded: Simultaneously in Twelve Realities
Pedagogical Model: Sympoietic Translation

The Institute for Translational Entanglement emerged when the borders between languages, disciplines, and species became unrecognisable. It is not a school in the traditional sense—it is a loom, a murmuration, a glitch in the syntax of reality.

Here, students do not “study translation”; they become it. Learning begins with silence. Then: gestures, glimmers, touch. Interpreters include moths, mosses, and multilingual algorithms.

Worms were invited to the founding workshop. They responded by weaving words into wool, composting miscommunication into nuance. In one celebrated experiment, a seminar was co-facilitated by an AI poetry engine and a spider web. Each word spoke multiple worlds.

Assessment takes the form of resonance. If what you say echoes in an unfamiliar body, you pass.

The current Dean, an octopus named Gr8ph (pronounced “grapheme-eight”), communicates via chromatophore-based flickers and has rewritten the curriculum in eight dimensions. Under their leadership, the Institute has developed a radical pedagogy of entanglement: knowing not as mastery, but as reciprocal becoming.

The motto: “Everything is a mistranslation. And that’s where we begin.”

Case Study 4: The Pelagic School for Submerged Knowledges

Location: 80 fathoms below sea level, migrating with the currents
Founded: After the last shoreline disappeared from official map
Pedagogical Model: Immersion and Echo-location

After the deluge, some thought learning must float. But others, the drifters and submergers, followed the fish.

The Pelagic School operates beneath the waves, literally. Enrolment requires breath control or symbiosis with gilled companions. Classes are conducted in bioluminescence, sonar, and the language of long memory. The curriculum is waterlogged but rich.

Syllabi are etched onto kelp scrolls and eaten once memorised. Students learn through drift, absorption, and tidal osmosis. Lecture halls are whale carcasses or coral cathedrals. Discussions ripple outward, often distorted by currents—clarity is not the aim.

Core modules include:

• Advanced Echolocation for Archival Recovery
• Underwater Myths as Epistemic Resistance
• The Poetics of Pressure: Deep Sea Writing Labs

Assessment is decayed slowly by saltwater. The longer a concept resists erosion, the more valid it is considered. Some doctoral students evolve new limbs mid-way through their thesis. Others are swallowed whole by curriculum and emerge years later, luminous.

It is said the School is currently migrating through the Mariana Trench, searching for a lost song that may be the original thesis on interspecies pedagogy.

Case Study 5: The Interstellar Free University of Improper Objects

Location: In geosynchronous orbit around forgotten dreams
Founded: In a sleep cycle shared by three insomniac philosophers and a moth
Pedagogical Model: Improvisation, Gravity Reversal, Anti-Object-Oriented Ontology

The Interstellar Free University of Improper Objects cannot be located, only stumbled into during lucid dreaming or sudden flashes of intuition. Its facilities include rogue satellites, memory palaces in the shape of extinct instruments, and zero-gravity lecture bubbles.

Its faculty are a shifting assemblage of exiled theorists, abandoned AI pets, and objects that refuse to be objects: a mourning lamp, a language virus, a flute made of haunted air.

The core principle: “Improper objects are more instructive than proper subjects.”
Learning here occurs via unstable orbit. Every student is expected to invent a theory that resists their own understanding. If it makes sense, you’re expelled.

Modules include:

• Affective Gravity Wells and the Pedagogy of Falling
• Anti-Taxonomy: Classifying the Unclassifiable
• The Improvised Curriculum as Cosmic Debris

To graduate, students must un-invent one object that has caused planetary harm (one notorious student successfully de-invented the concept of “metrics”).

The university communicates with other institutions via radiant noise and stray metaphors intercepted by poets. Its motto glows faintly in ultraviolet, readable only to bees and disoriented philosophers:

“Not everything that teaches has form. Not everything that forms should teach.”

Case Study 6: The Temporal Grove of Anarchival Play

Location: A forest that folds in on itself every equinox
Founded: Approximately 3,000 years in the future and 12 minutes ago
Pedagogical Model: Nonlinear Recursion, Anarchival Drift, Ludic Entanglement

The Temporal Grove is not a campus, but a composting. New students often find it by accident—by taking a wrong turn, misreading a map, or dreaming of trees with impossible geometries. Entry is only granted to those who forget what they came looking for.

Here, learning is recursive: events loop, mutate, echo forward and backward. The faculty includes feral children, retired time travellers, and sentient fungi who whisper in rhizomatic riddles. Trees are the primary record-keepers, but they refuse to be cited.

The Grove has no formal curriculum, but it does have Games—improvised, ritualistic, and absurd. Every learning outcome is also a joke, and every joke contains a secret. Play is both research method and survival strategy.

Ongoing games include:

• Hide and Seek with Your Former Self
• Capture the Flag in Four Dimensions
• Guess Who’s Speaking Through the Tree Today?

Assessment is experiential and recursive. To “pass,” one must be caught in a loop of their own making and find the precise moment when they began to listen differently. Some students never leave. Others reappear decades earlier, bearing strange diplomas made of bark and breath.

A legend persists of a “Final Seminar” that’s been happening for centuries, deep in the Grove’s heart, where past, present, and possibility sit in a circle, gently arguing over who gets to hold the stick.

The unofficial motto of the Grove, carved backward into a rock that doesn’t exist, is:

“Nothing is forgotten until it is truly played with.”

Case Study 7: The Cartographic Disorientation Bureau

Location: Nowhere specific. Always elsewhere.
Coordinates: Variable. They move when you look away.
Operating Hours: Dusk to dawn, though dusk and dawn are themselves unstable.

At the edge of the last known campus, beyond the line where maps fray into speculative topography, a bureau of radical geographers set up an orientation service that specialised in disorientation. The Cartographic Disorientation Bureau (CDB) was founded by a former curriculum designer who one day woke up unable to tell north from metaphor.

Their manifesto was etched into the wall of a tent made of lost compasses:

“We do not guide. We do not correct. We do not name. We unravel.”

Pedagogic Principle:
To learn, one must become lost—intellectually, spatially, linguistically, metaphysically. Only in unknowing can new relational cartographies emerge.

Methodologies included:

• Reverse Orienteering: Students were dropped into unmapped terrain and instructed to follow the wind until it became a whisper. The whisper usually offered a provocation or a riddle.
• Mythogeographic Drift: Learners wrote alternate histories of space by listening to soil, graffiti, and overheard snippets from passing crows. These narratives were compiled into the Altlas, a living, unbound document that changed depending on who held it.
• The Compass of Uncertainty: Participants carried a deliberately unreliable compass that pointed not to magnetic north, but to their most urgent question. The compass spun wildly when asked something dishonest.

Key Learning Outcome:
Graduates could no longer reliably locate themselves on institutional maps, CVs, or in bureaucratic time. Many of them went on to become facilitators of ‘unknowing seminars’ or joined the Ministry of Misplaced Priorities.

Notable Alumni:

• A cartographer who now draws maps only using fog.
• A wayfinder who refuses to lead anyone anywhere but insists on walking with them until they no longer need maps at all.
• A building that claims it graduated and now teaches orientation through collapse.

Posthuman Participation:
A migratory murmuration of starlings regularly enrolled themselves, offering aerial choreography as critique. One of them published a thesis in shadow and wingbeat.

Assessment Criteria:

• Number of wrong turns celebrated.
• Depth of disorientation achieved.
• Ability to make others question the ground they stand on.

CDB’s Motto:

“We are not lost. We are learning where the map ends.”

Case Study 8: The Temporal Composting School

Location: A collapsed clocktower repurposed as a regenerative temporal ecology.
Timezone: All of them, including the ones that haven’t been invented yet.
Enrollment Requirements: A willingness to rot.

The Temporal Composting School (TCS) emerged after a particularly ambitious attempt to implement a cross-campus synchronised timetable backfired, causing a minor temporal rupture in the scheduling department. Days began to overlap. Lunchtime lasted weeks. Some students aged backwards during assessment week. Others skipped semesters entirely.

Rather than seal the rupture, a cohort of rogue pedagogues and speculative agronomists chose to cultivate it.

Core Principle:
Learning, like soil, needs decay. Dead time must be composted to nourish emergent temporalities.

Curriculum Overview:

• Slow Theory: Students read a single sentence for an entire term. At the end, they were asked how it felt to be read by it.
• Chronotopic Germination: Learners buried syllabi in decomposing almanacs. New modules grew over time, often shaped by fungal networks and stray diary entries.
• The Post-Clock Practicum: Participants unlearned timekeeping by synchronising with plants, lunar tides, and the erratic breath of sleeping dogs. One seminar was conducted entirely via moss growth patterns.

Learning Outcomes:

• Students reported improved patience, deeper critical decay, and the ability to resist accelerationist agendas in bureaucratic ecosystems.
• Several graduates became temporal saboteurs, stealthily extending office hours into dreams and planting existential delay loops in calendar software.

Notable Faculty:

• A time-travelling compost heap that occasionally spoke in riddles.
• A grandmother who had lived the same week fifty-seven times and was ready to forget it differently.
• A whispering root system that communicated syllabus changes in seasonal pulses.

Technologies Used:

• Biodegradable clocks.
• Memory mulch.
• Temporal fermentation jars (strictly for pedagogical pickling).

Key Assessment:
Could the learner feel the moment rot?
Could they wait without waiting for?
Could they trace new futures from yesterday’s leftovers?

Motto:

“Time doesn’t pass. It composts.”

And now, as promised, from the Lexicon of Unlearning:

Entry: Disintelligence (n.)

Definition:
The sacred practice of abandoning mastery in favour of becoming intimate with the unknown. A radical form of curiosity that celebrates failure, stammering, and the fuzzy warmth of not knowing.

Synonyms:
Unmastery, Cognitive Drift, Deep Unknowing

Etymology:
From dis (apart, away) + intelligere (to understand) — literally, “to stand apart from understanding.”

Example in Practice:
“I achieved disintelligence when I tried to diagram the learning outcomes of a cloud. The cloud just kept raining on my rubric.”

Pedagogical Note:
Disintelligence is not stupidity. It is knowing better than to believe you know.

Cautionary Usage:
May cause traditionalists to panic and label you as a ‘danger to curriculum integrity’. Wear this badge with pride.

Case Study 9, freshly composted from the pedagogic ruins, and follow it with a dispatch from the future-past-present edge in Field Notes from the End of the World.

Case Study 9: The Faculty of Inter-Species Rhetoric

Location: A once-abandoned debating chamber overtaken by ivy and songbirds.
Founding Moment: When a raven interrupted a tenure review by quoting Derrida.

At the Faculty of Inter-Species Rhetoric (FIR), dialogue was no longer a purely human affair. Language was pluralised, parsed through beaks, pheromones, ultrasonic clicks, and fungal exhalations. To enrol was to agree that fluency was an obstacle, and grammar a colonial ghost.

Core Curriculum:

• Non-Human Persuasion Techniques: Learn to bark with nuance, rustle leaves as a political act, and transmit ambivalence via the tail-flick.
• Listening Without Ears: Practising attunement to rhythms, silences, spores, and vibrations that exceeded anthropocentric signal processing.
• Deconstructing the Monolingual Mind: A seminar co-taught by a polyglot myna bird and a council of wind.

Assessment Method:
Each student had to successfully co-write a manifesto with a species of their choice. These included collaborative essays with moss, dialogues with wolves, and an infamous duet with a jellyfish that won the faculty’s annual prize for “Most Elliptical Argument.”

Famous Lecture Series:

• “Whale Song as Counter-Colonial Critique”
• “The Bark as Bricolage: Doggo Dialectics in the Age of Disruption”
• “Silence is Not Empty: On Invertebrate Insistence”

Notable Faculty:

• Professor Lungwort, a lichen who delivered lectures slowly over the course of several seasons.
• Dr. Mx. Crick-Crack, a grasshopper known for its searing critiques of semantic capitalism.
• The Department Chair (literally a chair) grew legs after hearing too many lectures and now walks out of ones it finds boring.

Institutional Ethos:
Anthropocentrism is not a learning disability—but it is a recoverable condition.

Graduate Destinations:
Many alumni joined post-verbal think tanks, others dissolved into ecosystems. One student became a sentient fog bank and now tutors on metaphoric opacity.

Motto:

“We speak, therefore we listen. We listen, therefore we dissolve.”

‘…a scrap torn from a scorched notebook, drifting through dust…’

Case Study 10: The University of the Wild Beyond  

Location  

Everywhere and nowhere: in the cracks of the city, the margins of the institution, the kitchen, the squat, the woods, the digital commons, the fugitive fold.

Description  

The University of the Wild Beyond is not a university as you know it. It is a fugitive, improvisational, and joyful gathering of study, planning, and mutual care. It is not housed in buildings or bound by accreditation, but lives in the undercommons, a zone of refusal, of ‘being together in homelessness,’ a coalition of those who have been cast out, who refuse the terms of recognition and respectability, and who build new forms of life in the ruins and shadows of the old (Moten & Harney 2013:11)

Origin Story  

Born from the ashes of planetary crisis and institutional collapse, the University of the Wild Beyond emerged when radical learners, artists, and thinkers, refusing both the ‘call to order’ (Halberstam in Moten & Harney 2013:7)

and the logic of professionalisation, gathered to study and plan together. They understood, with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, that the university could only be approached criminally’ to ‘steal from it,’ to ‘abuse its hospitality,’ to be ‘in but not of’ the institution (Moten & Harney 2013:26). Their labour was unwelcome yet necessary, their presence always at risk of being rendered ‘waste, yet they persisted, finding one another in the wilds beyond the enclosure of the academy.

Key Practices  

Fugitive Planning: Refusing policy and governance that seeks to correct, manage, or extract. Planning is collective, improvisational, and always unfinished, an ‘experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night’ (Moten & Harney 2013:74).

Black Study: Not a discipline, but a mode of being and thinking together in difference and brokenness. Study happens in the ‘undercommon rooms,’ in the ‘nurses’ room, the barber shop, the squat, the dump, the woods, a bed, an embrace’ (Moten & Harney 2013:19).

Bad Debt: The currency is not credit, but ‘bad debt’ mutual, incalculable, unpayable, and unredeemable by the logic of capital. Members owe each other everything, and nothing can be paid back. This is a space of ‘fugitive publics,’ not communities or neighborhoods, but debtors at a distance, forgotten but never forgiven (Moten & Harney 2013:64).

Refusal: The first right is the refusal of the choices as offered. The University of the Wild Beyond refuses the call to order, the demand for productivity, the enclosure of knowledge, and the logic of ‘policy’ that seeks to fix what is ‘wrong’ with those who plan together (Moten & Harney 2013:52).

Improvisational Study: Study is not learning for credit, but the ongoing, dissonant, joyful noise of being together, planning, and dreaming. It is ‘study without an end, plan without a pause, rebel without a policy, conserve without a patrimony’ (Moten & Harney 2013:67)

Abolitionist Imagination: The aim is not to reform or restore the university or the world, but to abolish the very conditions that make prisons, universities, and other enclosures possible. Abolition here is ‘not the elimination of anything but the founding of a new society’ (Moten & Harney 2013:42)

Who Belongs?  

The maroons, the moles, the refugees, the outcasts, the passionate, the unprofessional, the uncollegial, the disloyal, the impractical, the naive, the ones who ‘never graduate,’ the ‘bad debtors,’ the ‘ones who manage to evade self-management in the enclosure,’ the ‘ones without interest who bring the muted noise and mutant grammar of the new general interest by refusing’ Moten & Harney 2013:52)

What Happens Here?  

Secret seminars in closed-down bars, study groups in abandoned lots, planning sessions in the kitchen at midnight, music and noise that refuses to become ‘music,’ only ever cacophony, improvisation, and the ‘joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton’ (Moten & Harney 2013:118).

Knowledge is given away, not credited. The best stuff is saved just to give it to you, and then it’s gone, a debt, a joke, a story, always elsewhere, always being forgotten and remembered again (Moten & Harney 2013:64).

There are no degrees, only debts and alliances. No graduation, only ongoing study. No curriculum, only the movement of things, the “movement of flight, of fugitivity itself’ Moten & Harney 2013:11).

How to Find It  

Look for it where ‘they say the state doesn’t work,’ where ‘there is something wrong with that street,’ where ‘new policies are to be introduced,’ where ‘tougher measures are to be taken,’ where ‘bad debt elaborates itself’ Moten & Harney 2013:65).

Listen for the noise, the laughter, the refusal, the sound of people planning, studying, loving, and conspiring together in the wild beyond.

Field Notes: The undercommons is not a realm where we rebel and we create critique; it is not a place where we ‘take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them.’ The undercommons is a space and time which is always here. Our goal…is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed’ (Halberstam in Moten & Harney 2013:9).

Research Questions  

How can planning be practiced as a fugitive, collective, and improvisational art, rather than a policy imposed from above?

What does it mean to study together in the absence of credit, recognition, or institutional legitimacy?

How can we conserve and transmit the knowledge of the undercommons, the ‘bad debt,’ the ‘mutant grammar,’ the ‘joyful noise,’ in a time of planetary unravelling?

Warnings  

The University of the Wild Beyond is always at risk of being recuperated, professionalised, or policed. It survives by remaining fugitive, by refusing capture, by moving, hiding, and restarting with the same joke, the same story, always elsewhere (Moten & Harney 2013:64).

To enter is to risk disorientation, to feel fear, trepidation, concern, and concern, but also to feel the movement of things, the possibility of another world in the world (Halberstam in Moten & Harney 2013:21).

For further investigation: Seek the undercommons. Listen for the noise. Refuse the call to order. Study together in the wild beyond.

Moten, F. & Harney, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/111751499.pdf

How the Nomadic Detective Agency Can Embody Fugitive Planning of the Undercommons

Embodying fugitive planning, as developed by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in ‘The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study’, means enacting a mode of collective, improvisational, and oppositional organization that exists in, but not of, dominant institutions. For the Nomadic Detective Agency, this would involve a radical reimagining of its practices, relationships, and aims, grounded in refusal, mutuality, and ongoing experimentation.

Key Principles for Embodiment

Refusal of the Call to Order:

The Agency should resist the pressure to conform to institutional logics, professionalization, or the demand for legibility and order. Instead, it should cultivate spaces where study, investigation, and planning happen outside the bounds of official recognition or accreditation. This means not seeking validation from established structures, but rather operating in the cracks and margins, allowing for ‘dissonant study, perhaps, disorganized study, but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room’ (Halberstam in Moten & Harney 2013:9).

Fugitive Collectivity:

We will prioritise ‘being together in homelessness’, a form of collective life that does not idealise precarity, but embraces the shared condition of dispossession and displacement. This is not about building a new stable institution, but about forming ‘maroon communities’ that are always at risk, always in motion, and always refusing to be fixed or captured by the dominant order’  (Moten & Harney 2013:30).

Improvisational Planning:

Planning is not a policy or a blueprint, but an ongoing, experimental process. It is ‘an experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night’ Moten & Harney 2013:74). The Agency’s projects emerge from collective needs and desires, not from external mandates or funding priorities.

Bad Debt and Mutuality:

The Agency operates on the principle of ‘bad debt’, a mutual, unpayable, and unmeasurable obligation to one another. Rather than seeking credit or recognition, members give and receive knowledge, care, and support without expectation of repayment or accumulation of status (Moten & Harney 2013:154).

Abolitionist Imagination:

The Agency’s work does not aim to reform or perfect existing systems, but to abolish the very conditions that make exclusion, enclosure, and exploitation possible. It is about ‘the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society’ (Moten & Harney 2013:42).

Speculative Practices for the Agency

Secret and Mobile Gatherings:

We hold study sessions, investigations, and planning meetings in unexpected places, abandoned buildings, parks, kitchens, digital backchannels, always shifting, never settling, to avoid capture and to remain open to new forms of encounter.

Refusal of Professionalisation:

 Reject the demand to become ‘experts’ or ‘professionals’ in the conventional sense. Embrace the label of ‘unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate and disloyal, as these are signs of fidelity to the undercommons’ (Halberstam in Moten & Harney 2013:20)

Improvised Archives and Knowledge Sharing:

We share findings, stories, and knowledge informally, through zines, whispered conversations, underground newsletters, or ephemeral digital traces, rather than through formal reports or academic publications.

Mutual Aid and Support:

We prioritise care for each other, materially and emotionally, over productivity or output. Recognise that the agency’s strength lies in its capacity to sustain its members in the face of dispossession and crisis.

Joyful Noise and Dissonance:

We embrace the ‘cacophony’ of collective life, music, laughter, disagreement, and improvisation, as a source of strength and creativity, rather than seeking harmony or consensus at all costs (Moten & Harney 

What This Looks Like in Practice

‘To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal… This is the only possible relationship… today. It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university’ (Moten & Harney 2013:135).

Translating this to the Nomadic Detective Agency:  

The Agency becomes a ‘refugee colony’ within and beyond the institution, ‘in but not of’ any system.

– It ‘steals’ resources, knowledge, and space, not for accumulation, but to redistribute and share, always in motion.

– Its investigations are not about solving cases for the authorities, but about uncovering, amplifying, and sustaining the life of the undercommons.

Lines of Flight

To embody fugitive planning, the Nomadic Detective Agency becomes a living experiment in collective refusal, improvisation, and mutual care, always in flight, always unfinished, always making ‘the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton (Halberstam in Moten & Harney 2013:20). Its work is not to fix the world, but to inhabit and cultivate ‘the wild beyond’ where another world is already being made.

From

Moten, F. & Harney, S. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf

Field Notes from the End of the World

Entry #73: The Library That Burned Itself

Coordinates: Smoky. Fuzzy. Somewhere between Alexandria and The Cloud.
Time of Writing: After the last backup failed. Before the first memory returned.

Today I found the Library that Burned Itself. Not in protest, not in panic—but as an act of pedagogic grace.

Its shelves curled like autumn leaves, releasing pages like spores. Each flaming folio whispered, “You don’t need me anymore.”

No one mourned.
Some danced.

A child held up a half-burnt index card and said, “Look—it remembers forgetting!”

A former professor fed kindling to the fire and said, “Finally, a curriculum with warmth.”

Books cooked themselves into smoke-syllabi that entered our lungs. I inhaled the Collected Works of Every Unasked Question, and exhaled a poem I didn’t understand.

We did not rebuild.
We composted the ash.

Someone—maybe me—scratched a final note into the soot-caked wall:

“If you’re reading this, you are the archive.”

5. Species of Radical Learner

Taxonomy (always in flux):

• Homo Nomadicus: migratory, interdisciplinary, allergic to silos.
• Pedagogica Tricksterii: shapeshifter, thrives in paradox, disrupts power with humour.
• Autoethnobotanica: writes their own roots, dreams in multiple epistemologies.
• The Transversalist: moves across boundaries, creates new ones in their wake.
• The Compostor: makes knowledge from decay; finds growth in endings.
• AI Familiaris: hybrid thinker, interfaces with algorithmic kin; builds ethics from entanglement.

Remember: you may be more than one species. You may be all of them. You may become another entirely by tomorrow.

6. Micro-Practices of Radical Learning

Small practices with planetary resonance. Do not underestimate their power.

• Walk without destination. Listen for what calls you.
• Translate a dream into a lesson plan. Teach it to a river.
• Hold a seminar with nonhuman participants. Let the wind contribute.
• Design a syllabus with no outcomes. Only questions.
• Learn something that terrifies you.
• Write an essay in collaboration with a shadow.

These are not activities. They are invocations.

7. Risk Assessment: Learning Without Guarantees

The following risks are inherent in radical learning:

• Loss of certainty
• Epistemic vertigo
• Unexpected kinships
• Being changed by what you study
• Losing the desire to graduate

Mitigation strategy: Welcome uncertainty as a teacher. Risk is the price of emergence.

8. Accreditation: Who Says You’ve Learned?

The accreditation system has been composted.

In its place: mutual recognition rituals, entangled witnessing, peer ceremonies. Sometimes a mushroom offers a badge. Sometimes you just know.

What counts as ‘completion’ is negotiated, improvised, never final.

Learning is not a ladder. It is a mycelium. Or a murmuration. Or a drift.

9. Epilogue: Becoming-Rhizomatic University

The rhizomatic university is no longer a building. It is a cloud of potential. A swarm. A commons.

You are now part of it.

Wherever you go, the university goes with you. In your backpack. In your bloodstream. In your silences.

The rhizomatic university is becoming.
And so are you.

1. Field Notes from the End of the World

Short dispatches or “found” pages from various nomadic learners—humans, fungi, AI shards, more-than-human agents—encountering, navigating, or misinterpreting the remnants of the university. Could be written in first-person, fragmented, poetic, or asemic styles.

2. The Lexicon of Unlearning

A rhizomatic glossary that doesn’t define but deforms institutional terms—e.g., “Assessment” becomes “Ritual of Recognition,” “Student” becomes “Nomad-Node,” “Learning Outcomes” become “Incantations of Control.” Entries could be contradictory, annotated, or speculative.

3. Protocols for Improvised Survival (or, DIY Degrees of Freedom)

A loose set of guidelines or rituals for learning otherwise. Think of these as the speculative pedagogical equivalents of survival zines: How to form a learning swarm. How to translate silence. How to make kin with a haunted curriculum.

4. Dream Archives of the Rhizomatic University

Collected dreams, hallucinations, and speculative memory fragments from those who have encountered or become part of the rhizomatic university. This could include AI-generated dreams, psychogeographic mappings, or dreams as data/affect/archives.

5. Maps to Nowhere (and Elsewhere)

Cartographies that refuse to stabilise. Sketches, diagrams, and non-linear learning pathways. Could be visual-textual hybrids—e.g., hand-drawn maps of forgotten learning spaces, mind-maps of fugitive knowledge practices, or topographies of desire and detour.

6. The Cabinet of Pedagogical Curiosities

A speculative Wunderkammer of objects, artefacts, and pedagogical tools. Each entry could describe a strange object (e.g., the Echoing Chalk, the Syllabus Seed, the Protocol Parasite) and how it’s used by radical learners in the field.

7. Encounters with the Nomadic Detective Agency

Speculative interviews, overheard conversations, or witness accounts involving members of the NDA—part cryptic, part comic, part clue. These pieces can play with genre (noir, sci-fi, magical realism) and epistemic tone.

8. Learning with the More-than-Human

Dialogues and lessons from fungi, rivers, ghosts, nonhuman intelligences. These sections could explore speculative ecopedagogy, multi-species learning encounters, or posthuman mentorship rituals.

9. The Syllabus of Disappearance

A final section—melancholic, haunted, hopeful—that offers a vanishing syllabus: texts, gestures, places, voices, questions that once shaped the Rhizomatic University but are now fading, lost, or waiting to be reactivated.

Nomadic Learners and Rhizomatic Universities: A Speculative Field Guide

For Radical Learners in a Time of Planetary Unravelling

1. Field Notes from the End of the World

A fragmented cartography of learning on the edge.

This section collates disjointed, poetic, and practical reflections from the frontlines of educational collapse and emergence. Think of it as dispatches from burnt-out classrooms, feral learning zones, and pop-up knowledge commons.

“Today we taught a seed how to speak. It mispronounced ‘photosynthesis’ as ‘freedom.’ We clapped anyway.”

Includes:

• Micro-stories from “last lectures”
• Field sketches of ruins repurposed as learning spaces
• Sonic maps of unrecognised knowledges
• Weather reports of the Anthropocene (e.g. “80% humidity of grief, chance of insurgency”)

2. The Lexicon of Unlearning

A glossary for detangling ourselves from the grammar of domination.

A playful, philosophical vocabulary of resistance. Words and concepts are redefined, remixed, or inverted. Inspired by Deleuze & Guattari, Harney & Moten, and Sylvia Wynter.

Examples:

• Assessment (n.): A ritual for enclosing knowledge in marks; now mostly ceremonial. See: Composting.
• Campus (n.): A site of both extraction and resistance. Frequently mobile, sometimes fungal.
• Curriculum (v.): To wander, to detour, to get deliciously lost.
• Belonging (adj.): A state of becoming-with others, non-fixed, symbiotic.

Accompanied by speculative etymologies, mis-translations, and learner annotations.

3. Maps for Getting Lost

Psychogeographies of a post-institutional world.

A collection of dérive-based routes, sensorium experiments, and counter-mapping exercises that challenge dominant spatial imaginaries of learning.

Contents:

• Walkshop protocols (e.g. “Follow the scent of moss for 10 minutes”)
• Anti-timetables
• Mapping the invisible (language, care, surveillance)
• Fold-out speculative atlas: The Rhizomatic University

Encourages learners to become cartographers of the unrecognised and unrecognisable.

4. Decolonial Survival Kits

What to carry when the curriculum burns.

Each kit is curated by a nomadic agent and contains tools, texts, rituals, and companions for decolonial learning journeys. Some are practical; others are poetic, surreal, or ceremonial.

Example kit:

• A cracked mirror (for reflecting power)
• Seeds wrapped in banned books
• A map with no borders
• A pocket library: Audre Lorde, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, mushroom field guides
• A prayer in multiple tongues

Features include:

• “How to build your own kit” guide
• Reclaimed object inventories
• Collective rituals of refusal and re-imagination

5. Exercises in Disobedient Learning

Uncurricular activities for feral pedagogues.

Short provocations, games, and embodied exercises that foster critical unlearning, transversality, and speculative worldbuilding. Designed to be hacked and mutated.

Sample exercises:

• Time Travel Dialogue: Write a letter to your future posthuman teacher.
• Curriculum Jam: Remix a university prospectus into a pirate radio script.
• Speculative Accreditation: Design your own degree based on dreams, wounds, and stories.
• Plant-led Seminar: Let a local weed dictate the topic and tempo of the conversation.

Each entry includes notes on context, remixability, and resistance potential.

6. The Mythologies of the NDA

Origin stories and confessions from the Nomadic Detective Agency.

Blurring fiction, autofiction, and collective storytelling, this section narrates the formation of the NDA as a posthuman, multispecies, rhizomatic counter-university. Told through conflicting testimonies, unreliable timelines, and found documents.

Content includes:

• The NDA’s fluctuating manifesto(s)
• Trans-species interviews
• Case files from failed investigations
• Field drawings by non-human agents

This section invites readers to invent their own agencies and mytho-pedagogical identities.

Some references….

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press.  https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf 

Barthes, R. (1993). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Vintage Books. http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Camera_Lucida.pdf 

Casu, Mirko & Guarnera, Luca & Caponnetto, Pasquale & Battiato, Sebastiano. (2023). AI Mirage: The Impostor Bias and the Deepfake Detection Challenge in the Era of Artificial Illusions. 10.13140/RG.2.2.29628.82568.

Ingham. M. (2024). Becoming Wildly Nomadic with the Nomadic Detective Agency-Assemblage. In S. Abegglen, T. Burns,  R. Heller, R. Madhok, J. Sandars, S. Sinfield, U. Gitanjali Singh (Eds), Stories of Hope – Stories of hope – the future of education

Ingham, M. (2025). Nomadic Learners and Rhizomatic Universities. Routledge.

FEMINIST INTERNET (Internet).  2024. Available from: https://www.feministinternet.com/

Moltzau, A. (2024). Artificial Intelligence – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly Is Artificial Intelligence the Best That Has Happened to Our Civilisation, or the Worst? (Internet) ODSCJournal. Available from: https://medium.com/odscjournal/ai-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-ec7d08f9fa11

OpenAI. “GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners.” OpenAI, (Internet). 2020. Available from: https://openai.com/blog/gpt-3-unleashed/

Haynes, P. (2023 How can we utilise AI in higher education? (Internet). 2023. Available from: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/10/11/how-can-we-utilise-ai-in-higher-education/