PhD in One Night is a collective that questions and re-invents pedagogical constellations. By various actions such as workshops, meetings, happenings and films, PhD in One Night offers propositions for an aesthetic education for all. It deviates from conventional forms and seeks to explore new collaborations. Visit the website here.

The main inspiration of the collective is a book by Jacques Rancière, “Le Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle”, in which Rancière’s main protagonist Joseph Jacotot advocates the existence of an “equality of intelligences”, underlining the classical teaching method as a process of stultification, a process where one intelligence is always subordinated to another. In the steps of Jacotot, Rancière goes on to consider that any collective educational exercise based on the principle of searching, researching, comparing, verifying, guessing and translating will result in knowledge and collective intelligence. He continues with the premise that all people are of equal capacity to intelligence, and hence equality is not a destination to be reached, but in fact, equality is an axiom and a starting point:

“You must not go towards equality, but must start from equality. Starting from equality does not presuppose that everyone in the world has equal opportunities to learn, to express their capacities. That’s not the point. The point is that you have to start from the minimum equality that is given. The normal pedagogic logic says that people are ignorant, they don’t know how to get out of ignorance to learn, so we have to make some kind of an itinerary to move from ignorance to knowledge, starting from the difference between the one who knows and the one who does not know.”

Guerilla University

Read more about the latest project ‘Guerilla University’ in collaboration with Rojava University here.

The past years, Nina has collaborated on various audiovisual projects among which:

Blanqui and the Stars (2020) – 16′ as part of a collaborative ‘train of thoughts’, an intervention for “Dada, Law, Rancière”. Organised by University of Helsinki, Aalto University and Uniarts Helsinki.

 

Poems From Which We Learned (2019) – 60’

 

Re-Inhabiting the Uninhabitable (2014-2020) – 7’

 

Rancière’s Hands (2014) – 2′