The Silent University is an autonomous platform of exchange where the teachers are academics unable to share their knowledge and skills due to their residence status, either because their degrees are not recognized or because regaining access to academia is blocked for other reasons. Refugees, asylum seekers and migrants contribute in different ways to the programme, as lecturers, consultants and research fellows – by course development or specific research on key themes.
Day After Debt (UK) is a long-term collaborative art project, addressing and challenging the significance of student debt. Öğüt invited other artists to design sculptures that function as collection points for public contributions to a student loan debt relief campaign, all generating income which is redistributed through the Jubilee Debt Campaign in the UK and Debt Collective in the US.
Initiated by Öğüt, and becoming autonomous shortly after, Aciliyet Mektebi (The Studio of Urgency) was a pedagogic laboratory space, which started with an urgent need to rethink alternative models for the current education system in Turkey. It aimed to engage the existing capacity of knowledge between professionals and academic users, and to turn itself into a collective learning centre, operating on the basis of models of alternative economy: no budget, no sponsors, no grant applications, but collaboration and exchange.
http://thesilentuniversity.org/
http://createlondon.org/event/day-after-debt/
http://aciliyetmektebi.org/