There is a rising need to revisit our approach to academia that contributes to critical awareness and sound co-shaping of our shared environment. Encouraging interdisciplinary academic discourse, Laajverd initiates its visiting school that responds to conditions of ‘crises’. Crises are instants of shifting modalities – they mark points of change in a multi-layered program. It is a specific period of time that is crucial in several ways of identification and determination of a system that is being regulated in an escalated force field. Combined systems of humans and nature are convoluted in terms of how they anticipate and respond to disturbed environments: disasters and conflict zones. The capacity to deal with the types of uncertainties and surprises requires innovative approaches, creative combinations of strategies, and the ability to adapt to the changing environment.
How does the creative and developmental faculty respond actively to shifting environments? This intensive invites the creative and developmental faculty, students and field experts to join this visiting school in chalking out a more effective academic methodology.
Academy For Democracy is a practice led research project that aims to analyze, understand and refine the role of the creative faculty in order to equip them with the precise body of knowledge that will aid them during humanitarian activities. By extensive research into the academic structures and the professional practice that follows, this project investigates new and creative methodologies that re-structure the current academic process.
Experimental cooperation across disciplinary boundaries exemplified in this project seeks to address the educational skills needed to tackle the critical environmental and humanitarian challenges. The immediate goal of the AFD is to collaboratively engage with the community under study in order to analyse the context and experiment multiple ways of reconciliation. The visiting school further composes a trans-disciplinary curriculum for higher education, presenting a workable and academically feasible design for shared knowledge building under the AFD visiting school auspices. The research and seminar topics are designed by instructors from different fields that not only present a broader understanding of the subject under study but aims to experiment with the various ways in which we perceive the human condition within the geo-fabric.
Laajverd Visiting School is a yearly project that will set up base in different crises and conflict environments.
– Zahra Hussain, Director LVS