Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy

Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA) emerged from our involvement in Zapatista solidarity efforts that sought to go “beyond solidarity” in confronting the inequalities associated with neoliberal structural adjustment. Our goal was and continues to be to “reweave the social fabric,” to attend to the ripped, frayed, and unraveling portions of our community by helping to reconstruct a social infrastructure of community. Drawing on a long history of co-generating horizontal spaces of learning, research, and action we engage a series of initiatives that support an on-going convivial research and engaged learning around community safety, food sovereignty, community based health, and environmental stewardship. Our community learning and research approach networks several projects across the entire San Francisco Bay Area and the surrounding periphery to address a number of concerns, specifically the violence directed at Black and Brown and other marginalized communities and the efforts of families, particularly women, across neighborhoods to organize collectively for their own well being and the community’s regeneration. Community safety, one of our principal engagements, recuperates the community’s history of defense and justice alongside moments of community assembly to confront current strategies of "differential policing and racial quarantine" and its impact on the Black and Brown communities of the Bay Area. To that end, as a grassroots “research institute,” rather than organizing ourselves around “data” and “problems” as defined from the outside, we mobilize across communities to create spaces that take seriously the co-production of local knowledges in service of greater struggles for autonomy. Horizontal research and shared learning approaches are at the center of our efforts to advance community safety while at the same moment instituting spaces of participatory democracy through the proliferation of local assemblies.

Over the last few years the CCRA has been successful in activating Universidad de la Tierra Califas, a network of autonomous learning spaces that extend the convivial learning praxis of the Universidad de la Tierra Oaxaca. UT Califas claims no buildings nor does a cumbersome bureaucracy burden it. Rather, UT Califas is a grassroots network of autonomous learning spaces, or temporary autonomous zones of knowledge production, that engage deprofessionalized intellectuals, community-based scholars, local culture-bearers, convivial researchers, and insurgent learners. Committed to co-generating locally situated strategic knowledges and collective practices, our shared path imagines UT Califas as a cargo, or a collectively entrusted community obligation for community regeneration. As an alternative to formal, bureaucratic industrial tools, UT Califas engages established movement spaces and capacity building moments as well as popular education practices and militant research mobilizations to promote a variety of grassroots “technologies” that address local issues as well as develop critical analytical skills, collective research practices, shared facilitation techniques, and direct action strategies that prioritize the intersections between community regeneration, community safety, food wisdom, environmental renewal, and convivial learning.

Our commitment to find new ways to advance “spaces of encounter” as moments of critical collective research and learning spaces that are also spaces of democratic renewal has led to the co-construction a series of workshops, research projects, and “direct action casework.” These include a collaboratively developed research and writing project with women inside prisons; spaces for situated, strategic testimonios to emerge by bringing together families who have lost loved ones to police and other forms of community violence; community based People’s Investigations that put the organizing efforts of the family at the center of the work; an emergent Community Safety Database that documents, archives, and makes available incidents of violence within communities while providing support and resources to address police excess; and series of monthly ateneos, convened as “spaces of encounter” among local youth, educators, scholars, graduate students, local historians, and people organizing across community safety and community well-being projects. Additionally, the Convivial Research and Insurgent Learning taller <http://cril.mitotedigital.org> encourages locally rooted investigations. The spaces we convene are always deliberately horizontal and focused in support of local initiatives that celebrate communities convening in assemblies that are spaces of research, learning, and collective decision-making.