Prefigurative pedagogies: Learning to build alternative futures in student housing co-operatives

Abstract

How and where can young people learn to imagine and create alternative futures? In this article, I argue that student housing co-operatives in the UK are sites of prefigurative pedagogies that enable students to experiment with new ways of dwelling, being and making in the world. Through collective living and learning, student housing co-operators contribute to building urban commons as near counter-futures to financialized student housing and marketized Higher Education. Their daily practices of homemaking constitute an example of students’ participation in experiential futuring that nurtures horizontal democracy, mutual care and collective labor as components of potential post-capitalist futures. Based on long-term qualitative research with co-operatives in Edinburgh and Brighton, I analyze the pedagogical formation of co-operative subjectivities, values and relationships that student housing co-operatives enable and explore spatial autonomies, differentiated labor divisions and rent policies as concrete practices through which their residents prefigure alternative futures.