The Pirate Academy

This series combines lectures, artistic practices, and participatory activities such as listening, drawing, walking, and sharing, aiming to stimulate both critical thinking and collective reflection. The Pirate Academy are taking place during autumn 2025 and spring 2026 in and around Linnaeus University in Växjö. 

Time: 13:15–15:00, 20 November 2025
Location: University Library, Campus Växjö

No preparation required.
Everyone is welcome!

More information about Brandon Labelles residency at Linnaeus Residency Programme

For more information and contact: Helen Hägglund, Operational Manager of The Cultural University

Introduction to the Pirate Academy
With the establishment of artistic, practice-based research methods, art is increasingly understood as a form of knowledge production. As Tom Holert highlights, art today is predominantly viewed as “epistemic activity.” Such a development follows from the prevailing logic underpinning the global knowledge economy and the ways in which information and data function as new forms of power and currency. This seems to invite a number of questions, such as: What do we mean by knowledge production and in what way does a logic of production lead to particular ways of knowing? If art is largely a gesture of epistemic activity, what kind of knowledge does it make possible? And how might artistic methods contribute to movements of epistemic agency and the ongoing need for decolonizing knowledge practices?

The Pirate Academy is organized as a public seminar series aimed at investigating the prevailing logic of knowledge production and in what ways knowledge itself functions as hegemonic. To do so, the notion of poetic knowledge is offered as a potential counter-logic or creative supplement. Stemming from the writings of James S. Taylor, poetic knowledge explicitly works at reclaiming a relation to knowing grounded in the fullness of the senses, lending to what Taylor terms “knowing by way of the inside.” In contrast to traditional ideas of scientific objectivity, and the imperative to analyze, dissect, categorize and instrumentalize, poetic knowledge is profoundly sympathetic, subjective, and defined by love. As the ability to “see the life within the object” (as Robin Wall Kimmerer notes), a poetic way of knowing is suggestive for a link with planetary cosmologies and the “beauty of living things.” Moreover, poetic knowledge follows from the distinction Hannah Arendt makes between “knowing” and “thinking,” where knowing is aligned with the search for truth and thinking instead with poetic wisdom. For Arendt, “the will to know” has become a dominant force within human society, undermining our ability to think freely. As Arendt argues, thinking equates with contemplation and the “uselessness” of art, whereas knowing is utilitarian and directed toward scientific capture as well as ideologies of progress. As Taylor summarizes, “poetry discovers, science proves.”

Following these views, the seminar series will be devoted to exploring understandings of poetics, poetic knowledge, and what will be highlighted as “the will to listen”. The Pirate Academy sets out to bring to life a range of critical perspectives through opening a collective and collaborative space for free thinking. This will include the presentation of particular theoretical views and references through prepared lectures, along with specific artistic and historical examples, as well as invitations to join in gentle material activity related to listening, drawing, walking and sharing. We’ll consider the possibility that poetic thinking may be what is needed today to challenge dominant systems with their related enclosures: to act poetically, as Fred Moten highlights, is to “refuse to be settled.”