Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Hypatia Vourloumis

Thesis: Pedagogy’s Pathways: On Togetherness, Adaptability and Refusal

July 2025

Abstract

Pedagogy’s Pathways: On Togetherness, Adaptability, and Refusal traces the formation of a radical pedagogical practice through the author’s lived experiences across domestic, informal, and institutional learning spaces. From childhood religious circles in Turkey to collective organizing with football ultras, from self-designed university curricula to collaborative teaching at the Willem de Kooning Academy, this thesis maps how pedagogy emerges not as a neutral technique but as a political and ancestral practice—shaped by resistance, care, and improvisation. Grounded in embodied knowledge and dialogic encounters, the study weaves personal narrative with the work of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Munir Fasheh, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten to articulate three core principles: togetherness (learning as relational and communal), adaptability (responsive, context-specific methods), and refusal (rejecting oppressive structures while staying in relation). Through autoethnography, collective study sessions, and experimental writing methods, the thesis enacts its own methodology, refusing the isolation of academic labor in favor of fugitive, co-created knowledge. Ultimately, it argues for pedagogy as a site of liberation—a practice that honors the wisdom of oppressed communities, transforms hierarchies, and sustains the unfinished work of collective emancipation.

Author: Tuba Kılıç