What becomes possible when study is detached from education, accreditation and the demand for individual improvement? And what kinds of social relations emerge when study is approached not as preparation for a qualification or career, but as something worth doing in itself?
Here are are joined by Eli Meyerhoff, author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, and Giovanni Marmont, author of A Studious Use: Designing from the Undercommons. Together they explore study as a collective and intrinsically motivated practice, distinct from the institutional forms that usually organise, measure and give credit for it. Meyerhoff discusses his concept of “modes of study” as a way of historicising education and making its dominant forms appear less inevitable. Drawing on experiences including the Experimental College of the Twin Cities and Abolitionist University Studies, the conversation considers what happens when grades, credits and other external rewards are removed, and when relationships among participants become central to sustaining study. Marmont develops this through his account of study as attentive engagement, collective tuning and shared indebtedness: less a matter of acquiring something for oneself than of becoming increasingly responsive to how our actions are entangled with those of others.

The discussion also considers the difficulties involved in creating alternatives. Projects outside universities can easily carry academic assumptions, hierarchies and habits with them, reproducing the very forms they hoped to escape. Free universities, para-academic publishing and other autonomous initiatives therefore raise questions not only about where study happens, but about the social forms through which it is organised. From there, the conversation turns toward media and publishing. Rather than beginning with a predetermined output – a book, podcast or journal – the participants ask what forms of media might grow from the kinds of relationships and practices of study being created. Publications can become points of entry into further encounters rather than finished products: occasions for extending conversations, making connections and sustaining collective inquiry.

The episode also introduces Minor Compositions’ emerging formulation Fugitive Study, Autonomous Media: an attempt to think of publishing less as the production of content than as the creation of spaces, relationships and infrastructures through which study can continue to happen.

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