COUNTER-INSTITUTIONS: LESSONS FROM RADICAL EXPERIMENTS IN EDUCATION & CARE
Institutions that are supposed to provide care and strengthen social bonds are traversed by neoliberal injunctions that alienate both professionals and those they serve. Care and education workers, such as teachers and social workers, grapple with the systemic dismantling of the ethical core of their work, while users of institutions feel more dominated than supported. In the face of this crisis, we ask: how can we reclaim the institutional settings we navigate every day?
We will explore this question by turning to a lineage of radical educators, psychiatrists, and social workers associated with the ‘institutional pedagogy’ and ‘institutional psychotherapy’ movements that emerged in post-war France. Working within clinics, asylums, and schools, these practitioners developed unexpected modes of cooperation and spaces of freedom by exploiting the porosity, limits, and contradictions of institutional frameworks. In doing so, they created “counter-institutions”: methods of working within institutions that simultaneously critique them and transform them.
We will look at the legacy of figures such as Francesc Tosquelles, Fernand Deligny, Jean and Fernand Oury, and Aïda Vazquez, and ask how they can provide coordinates for navigating contemporary crises in educational and care work. Participants will adapt class materials so that they can be directly applied to the institutions that they navigate in their daily lives. Each class will include strategy exercises that we can implement in the institutional contexts we inhabit. The class will culminate with prototypes for counter institutions, i.e. individually or collectively developed proposals for micro-interventions within a chosen institutional setting.
Mondays, 6-8 EST (3-5 PM PST) Online on Zoom 120 minute sessions, 5 weeks June 22 - July 20, 2026 $125 - $375 Tuition Select scholarships and solidarity rate discounts available upon request.
Lauren Vanzandt-Escobar works in education, research, and visual art. She has spent over a decade working in literacy education programs at the margins of formal schooling, in particular in jails, prisons, and child welfare agencies, and is fascinated by questions around power and politics in literacy and art education in institutional settings. She has a daily drawing practice that probes translation, the relation between language and materiality, sound and image, place and movement, and the way in which drawing can embed itself into the interstices of everyday life. She holds a masters in the History and Philosophy of Education, and conducts research on the history of alternative and radical education and care practices, with the goal of providing opportunities for people to share and exchange on the political and ethical dimensions of their educational and care practices.
Image credit: "Francesc Tosquelles on the Roof of a Building at the Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital, Holding a Sculpture by Auguste Forestier", 1947, Gelatin silver print, 7 x 4 7/8 in Collection Family Ou-Rabah Tosquelles, (Originally photographed by Romain Vigouroux, Reproduced by Roberto Ruiz)
