The School for Public Life
The School for Public Life: A Study Group for Listening
From January 2025, Bureau for Listening will organize a monthly School for Public Life – a possible study group on/for/with/by listening. Its session will be held at different public spaces across Copenhagen and engage directly with the urban tissue as a site for exploration and intervention and as a chance to nurture practices of radical receptivity and attentiveness to the social, political, and ecological dimensions of listening.
Each convening seek to offer diverse perspectives on listening as a critical and creative act. These sessions will explore listening as a means of fostering dialogue, revealing hidden narratives, and transforming shared spaces within civic practices. Different invited artists and theorists, and collaborations with institutions will support this attempt by sharing their unique perspectives within the sessions.
The School for Public Life will work toward an ecology of attention, using listening to cultivate resonant and relational practices that imagine new possibilities for public life. Join us in this journey as we transform the city into a field of inquiry and listening into a tool for collective transformation.
This is initiated in the anticipation of a manifestation of the Listening Biennial in Copenhagen during September and October 2025.
Everyone is welcome, all sessions will be held outside. No registration is necessary, but due to limited space and better planning we ask you, if possible, to send us a mail and check-in – please write to bureauforlistening@gmail.com. We update ongoingly where and when here on the website and through other channels.
Calendar/programme/info:
Session 1:
January, Thursday the 30th, 16.30-18.00
We meet at the future to be ‘Palestine Square’, at the conjunction between Nørrebrogade, Esromgade and Hillerødgade – across from Den Røde Plads (Red Square) (see photo to the right).
Possible content:
- Upstart: Walking and Listening; Lecture Demonstrations for a new Public
- ‘What is a ‘School for Public Life’ – searching for other dreams, hopes, questions, wonderings and problems; a workshop for re-imaginations and -orientations.
- Reading of The Big Welcome
- Listening Walk – dreams for new publics – reappropriation of Max Neuhaus’ ‘Listen’
- Sharing/discussion – creation of invitations for walking and listening in the public
Session 2:
February, Thursday the 27th, 16.30-18.00
Session 3:
Marts, Thursday the 27th, 16.30-18.00
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The School for Public Life build on idea and book ‘The School of Public Life’ by Fred Dewey 2014, published by Errant Bodies Press, Berlin.
While the book builds on Dewey comprehensive activistic practice it is also situated in the context of The United States of America.
For this project we are leaning into the vision of such a school, lending an altered version of the title, but are otherwise on a different path – smaller in scale and perhaps more unsure and experimental in its nature.
We do however listen to the words of Dewey when he writes:
The School of Public Life starts from a premise that is deadly – that this is deadly, that it demands remedy, and that a new way of thinking and acting is possible, right there, and needed.
For what is called “public” and “real” has perhaps never truly belonged to the people themselves. We have everything but a realm for us – what plural and free people convening, face-to-face, would be able, in every place, wherever and whenever we chose, to find out, discuss, engage, witness, answer, and govern, certain we are protected by every power in doing so. By contrast, a truly public realm, were to exist, would be the realm where we could find actuality and govern from it, face-to-face, from all our differences, with every fact, action, made thing, and experience necessary. The public is not a virtual space or space of ideas, nor is it a party, administrative, social, production, machine, or official space, whatever we are told. It is the full life of the people, lived by and for the people. It is where actuality and reality, in all their plurality, diversity, and factuality could be sensed and decided, on our terms, for our benefit. Public life is not the school of what society, officials, administrators, media, technology “knowledge” and “authority” say and do. It is we who make up this world and the living that concerns us – whoever, whatever, whenever, and wherever we are. It is our life that is the foundation of every country, place, thing, and condition. It is the plurality we are, have been, and remains strangers, neighbors, and friends to each other.
[…]
What is at stake, when one asks “what about the people,” are our capacities. For people remain the issue. Contrary to long-held assumptions, thinking-like judging, willing, imagining, and acting-depends on who one is, where, when, with whom, under what conditions, and where this goes. Human factuality governs each thing and activity’s meaning, truth, and durability. The school of public life would be the space to experience and finally sort this out- not through mere “discourse” or mere “communication,” but through sensing each other and the world as they are, having a space for the depths of that, and all it lends and establishes. Like other places or forms, it would be the place where could respond and answer a “structure,” if you will, that is at once hypothetical, descriptive, and actual. […] Only we, when we come face-to-face, to govern, can get at this and secure this, can answer what is so, has been so, and what, altogether, in due course and due process, we decide should remain so. It is a venture because it is existential. It embodies the risks and realities we face. Like “the school of hard knocks,” the school of public life is not a metaphor. It is what would help us grasp and answer what otherwise, without such secure space and time, would destroy, elude, or uno us, and so the world.
Fred Dewey, The School of Public Life, 2014, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin.
The Big Welcome
Adapted by Bureau for Listening for The School for Public Life
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Desired to be read out loud at the beginning of each session.
Following the evolvement of the school we imagine future editions to accommodate the expand awareness of studying and being in and of public life.
This is a version adapted from Kate Morales’ version offered in Slow Spatial Reader – Chronicles of Radical Affect (Ed. Carolyn F. Strauss).
As reference the following were written:
“These words of welcome began as an offering out of the Mycelium School (2013-2016) in Ashville, NC, USA, and have evolved through many iterations as they have been applied to welcome many different groups of people in a variety of gatherings. This version was adapted for the Turtle Island Ecoversities Regional Gathering (January 21, 2021). All those receiving these words are free to credit, modify, and share as needed for their own gatherings, in the spirit of the gift economy.”