This article introduces reading groups as organisational forms. It argues that reading groups are important forms of mutual learning and critical knowledge production that have a place in alternative organising and social and political movements. It also highlights the importance of the co-creation of knowledge and subjectivity which can potentially lead to the development of agency, solidarity and social power.
In order to start to map a genealogy of reading groups, a range of examples are examined, from the early 20th century in relation to anti-authoritarian mutual pedagogy and worker cultures of self-learning and cooperation; from the s in relation to feminism, the New Left and union organised worker education; and then from the recent past, in relation to contemporary work and social movements.
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This article thereby shows the potential for mutual learning practices to help to build and sustain social infrastructures for resistance and social transformation. Reading groups exist across such a wide variety of contexts and are perhaps so ubiquitous as to be almost ignored. There is little to no existing literature that specifically deals with reading groups as organisational forms and this is therefore an exploratory article that aims to start to map out this field for further discussion and research.
The workers inquiry approach to knowledge production is one that seeks to understand the changing composition of labour and its potential for revolutionary social transformation Figiel et al. The aim is the mutual transformation of both material conditions and the self Wellbrook, , one in order to change the other and vice versa.
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Intellectual commons are the intangible resources produced by sharing and collaboration. Commons practices are ones which, while producing and managing resources, in this case knowledge and intellectual commons, constantly reproduce the communal relations upon which the productive process is based and the resource is managed Broumas, It can be argued that commons are continually being produced while at the same time, capital is constantly attempting to capture and put them to work.
