Saturday School 2024
Saturday School 2024 is a creative learning lab to embody, imagine and design for border abolition.
This year, from Spring 2024 - Spring 2025, we engage with an invited cohort of 20 organisers, infrastructure builders and creative practitioners with lived experience of migration, diaspora and/or racialisation, to:
Collectively analyse histories/futures of abolition, conflict and climate change adaption, ancestral practice/strategy and infrastructure building.
Design and develop individual experiments, set intentions, and be supported to staying accountable
Explore creative and visual ways of reflecting, documenting and framing experiments to a wider public.
Resource resilience and imagination with practice spaces in embodied leadership and science fiction writing.
Share and disseminate our learnings with a wider movement ecosystem and public
As part of our programme, we are hosting public Spring Conversations that frame the context in which we will explore practical experiments. Guest speakers will share their reflections and practices around border abolition, conflict and climate change adaptation and sacred strategy.
The right to stay / The right to move: Organising in a climate changing and securitised world
How are we organising around 2 key principles; the right to stay - to defend communities from impacts of climate change and securitisation, and the right to move - safely and with dignity, when staying is not possible or desirable?
With: Scott McAulay (Anthropocene Architecture School), Innah Gaspar (Global Communications Council (GSCC)), & Ghassan Ghaben (Gaza Families Reunited Campaign), chaired by Aliya Yule (Migrants Organise)
Sacred Civics: Shaping our systems as if peoples, lands and natures were sacred
How are we shaping our relationships, infrastructures and systems as if peoples, lands and natures were sacred? And how does the recognition of sacredness help us to envision and build for a world without borders?
With: Jayne Engle (Co-author of ‘Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities’), Manuwi C Tokai (Artist, Ancestrial Peace Work), Fang-Jui 'Fang-Raye' Chang (Dark Matter Labs), chaired by Joon-Lynn Goh (Migrants in Culture)
Abolition is Presence: Mapping the practices and possibilities of border abolition in the UK
What ways are we witnessing the presence of abolition in the UK today? How are migrant and abolitionist organisers building on histories of resistance and experimenting into the future?
With: Gracie Mae Bradley (Co-Author of Against Borders), Kelsey M (Cradle Community), Azfar Shafi (Nijjor Manush), chaired by Nishma Jethwa (The Rights Collective)
Saturday School aims to culminate in 2026 with a Border Abolition Summit, sharing 3 years of learning, alongside the publication and dissemination of a Workbook and Sci-Fi Anthology in Border Abolition.
Saturday School 2023 - Images by Sana Badri
Any questions?
Get in touch with Becca from Migrants in Culture: hello@migrantsinculture.com
Who is delivering Saturday School?
Saturday School is delivered by Migrants in Culture in partnership with Migrants Organise, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, Healing Justice London and Align.