2025-2026 COOP study group ~ Publishing Practices - In the Wake of Erasure
Tutor team:
Guests:
Jihan El Tahri
Lydia Amarouche (Shed Publishing)
More TBA
Partner Institution:
Student participants:
Ayris Taban, Beatrice Secchia, Dariya Trubina, Ginevra Collini, Ivor Glavaš, Jamie Donald, Josse Vessies, Liam Warren, Moss Lutz, Salome Erni, Tomaso de Luca, Yuzhen Chen
Student led reflection:
Chronicles
Program:
Publishing Practices - In the Wake of Erasure
Introduction:
Publishing Practices situates itself in the shattered present of interrelated struggles against settler-colonial and neocolonial violence—from the efferate violence unfolding in Palestine to the entrenched oppression in Sudan, Congo, and Western Sahara, and the enduring anti-imperial resistance across the board. This COOP begins from the understanding that publishing has historically been a tool of empire, operating both within its metropolitan cores and across the extractive lines it creates. It is a discipline that crafts narratives from the belly of empire to legitimise displacement and annihilation, while systematically erasing other forms of life, knowledge, and world-making in the very regions it destroys.
In response, this COOP asks how publishing can serve as a practice of counter-erasure. Publishing is seen as an act of ethical witnessing and insurgent remembrance. The concept of the wake, as articulated by Christina Sharpe, guides us through the ongoing consequences of destruction. The goal is to engage collectively, assemble fragmented histories, and recover what has been suppressed.
We will approach publishing through the texturalities of resistance: reading the textures of textiles, reciting the prose of plaits, studying the syntax of sonics, and generating citations of seeds and shouts. Our practice engages with woven maps and coded scripts that carry stories of place, mnemonic rituals and fluid monuments that protest historical absence, and embroidery and braided objects that hold ancestral and diasporic storytelling.
This is not a COOP about giving voice, but about critically engaging with methodologies of amplification and circulation. We will study the publishing tactics of liberation movements, the poetics of the fragment, and the power of the unauthorized archive. We will practice a publishing that is embodied, that refuses the neutral page and instead operates through collective, multi-sensorial acts of recording and dissemination.
This COOP calls for publishing as a tool to refuse the silence of the archive. It is a commitment to stay with the trouble of unimaginable loss, not to solve it, but to stand in ethical relation, to document, to mourn, and to forge pathways of relentless, world-making remembrance.
