FOPA Festival 2025:
Institutional Drift, Value at the Threshold
12–14 December, 2025
Ballam Ballam Place
RSVP here
As we move deeper into the 21st century, the crisis in education no longer needs announcing—it is now simply a boring vibe. Universities, once imagined as something other, are now little more than credentialing factories with branding strategies. Managerial logic, economic austerity, and the hollowing out of intellectual life have produced a kind of institutional auto-pilot: grey infrastructure for a world that no longer believes in anything, and values even less.
Within this terrain, we ask:
1. What remains of the institution?
2. How is ‘value’—cultural, intellectual, affective—produced and
3. perceived in its wake?
The second iteration of our Festival will be an unorthodox gathering of fragments and formats. It’ll be a space for public transmission, not dull formality. It’ll be for research that resists extraction, for knowledge and truths that aren’t easily audited. Across modes, participants and attendees will engage types of working that hover between institution and improvisation.
We welcome anyone that has ideas about the future of para-academia - educators without classrooms, researchers without grants, artists without audiences, and those building new architectures of meaning from the ruins of credentialed certainty.
Our festival is not necessarily about what education could be, should be or ought to be. It is a celebration of what we, despite our symbolic poverty, are already doing.
Early Announcements:
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Brian Massumi on The Parainstitutional Imperative: Toward an Anarchism of Value
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MSCP on Samuel Beckett’s poem Gnome
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Dan Ross in conversation on how to think AI philosophically
FOPA Festival 2024
FOPA Festival 2024 was the inaugural festival.
Watch the 2024 recordings.
Contributors:
Pell Mell Studio
Public Pedagogies Institute
Existentialist Society
Overland, Jacobin, Paris End
Critical Research Association Melbourne
Melbourne School of Contemporary Art
AJ Bartlett and Bryan Cooke
School of Political Economy
Platonic Academy Melbourne
Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy
Art Programme
Independent School of Philosophy
Mongrel Matter
I AI
Seventh Gallery
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Events
A Genocide Alphabet
This work is informed by our sense that the times call for minimalist thinking concerning our ontological truth, the minimal truth of an absolute criminal being. For some time now, we (of the West / Europeans) are being called upon to give a frank account of ourselves by those who already know us infinitely more intensely than we may know ourselves, namely the sovereign peoples whose lands we continue to occupy. For the occupiers, to be as (self-)knowing through and in response this call is to receive the imperative, ‘Think with your being as fully exposed to our being.’ It is fundamentally to face the question, ‘You are the bearers of criminal being. Who are you?’ The book invites the reader to respond to this question by following the colonizing movement of modern western proprietary being and exposing the concealment of its criminality.
23rd October, 2025, 6–8pm
MSCP Teaching Space
RSVP here
Ashpoems
These short poems are informed by a sense of a devastation in that the human face has been wiped from its places of emergence in history and love. They seek to acknowledge the depth of the catastrophe by re-posing the questions of language’s relationship, as memory and vision, to lost ideals and their deceased martyrs. This vein pursuit takes shape with rhythms seeking to highlight the erotic substrate of communication itself, through disruption of an ego-centric logic that involves whispering to dead words in the hope of making them speak to language. The mystery of language cannot be detected in its words.6th November, 2025, 6–8pm
MSCP Teaching Space
RSVP here
Writing
Manifesto
Perverting Felix Guattari’s analysis in Lines of Flight, FOPA is an attempt at doing collective equipment for para-academia. Collective equipment is the natural satellite of social-imaginary institutions. An obvious and relevant example being the institution of the University as such; the constellation of campuses, laboratories, presses etc. on the other hand, being its forms of collective equipment.
Para-academia is an institution. It has been so since the time of Plato’s Academy. And yet, in the present moment, it is not obvious what collective equipment functions para-academia possesses. FOPA, in taking the off-the-shelf idea of a festival, is a first minimal attempt at doing collective equipment for para-academia in this way.
Not in any way ironic, a critical and academic discourse emerged in the 1990’s concerning para-academia, para-academics, as well as ‘students’. This discourse relates to practices, methods, and forms of research. A primary finding of this enquiry was that para-academia is public forming. Put differently, para-academia simply occurs outside of official state institutions.
Read no further than Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society and its withering critique of manipulative institutional formations. Bluntly put, the modern school is a place of incarceration and indoctrination that produces the naturalisation of hierarchies as well as the values of capitalist consumer society. On his institutional spectrum, Illich counterposes ‘convivial institutions’ to that of the manipulative type. We see para-academia very much in the light of conviviality.
We must be wary of an overly Western cultural trajectory when it comes to problems arising from the question of para-academia in our situation today. So it is wise to adopt the Yolngu notion of “connectedness in separation”, a mode ensuring identity through difference. FOPA’s objectives are not defined by zero-sum logic. There ought to be a place for the public university, a university that approximates as best as possible the symbolic investments people have placed in its ideal. But first of all, it needs to be thoroughly decolonised. And para-academia must maintain a commitment to be constitutively aware of First Nations knowledges.
Thinking now, Fernand Deligny wrote that networks have one of two fates: oblivion or institutionalisation. Networks are sustained by tacit relationships. If those tacit relationships become formal and normative, then institutions emerge. If those tacit relationships simply run out of energy and creativity, then oblivion. Therefore, it is perhaps more apt to say that para-academia is a network in the sense that Deligny gives the term, rather than an institution understood through a long and arguably discontinuous history of counter-practices relative to official state education.
Which brings us to today. FOPA cannot—it is beyond its scope—determine or overdetermine what para-academia might be or mean to someone. Diktats of that nature would be utterly foolish given we are confronted with the pitiable envelope called 21st century experience: identitarian politics, genocidal racism, techno-feudalism, perpetual war, the mental health crisis, planetary systems collapse etc. It is in the context of this experience that para-academia deserves its urgency and attention, given the complicity of state institutions in the perpetuation and promulgation of this very same experience which is nothing less than terror.
These challenges require a collective effort from a responsible public. FOPA is an experiment in collective equipment for the set of tacit relationships that form the networks that compose para-academia. FOPA wants to keep communities-in-movement. We hope and trust that you enjoy our festival and events, that you will learn something, that you support, however you can, the entities participating in para-academia moving forward. This is what FOPA is about: the continued success of para-academic entities today such that in the future more emerges with your support.
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FOPA is developing collective equipment for para-academia. And that means reimagining education by building a new cultural sphere.
About
We are making the platforms, vehicles and events to grow knowledgeable publics. In other words, we are building the collective equipment for a new educational paradigm. Para-academia, put simply, is knowledge transfer outside of official state institutions. Including lectures, seminars, workshops, talks, presentations, teach-ins etc., the idea of how we experiment is the stake of learning itself. Para-academia is the generic ideal of education appearing within the social body. And the consequence is taking seriously the transcendental conditions that shape our worlds.
FOPA is taking a leading research, design and advocacy role in this emergent and innovative sphere. Our vision is to realise an ecotone comprising the TAFE, university, arts and cultural sectors here in Australia. This intersection of human flourishing will be critical to the development of new forms of inclusive prestige and social belonging in times of diminished trust in expertise.
Socially embedded knowledge, skills and creativity will be the force that positively drives change and transformation over the decades to come. A responsibility exists to intelligently challenge the polycrises that define the 21st Century.
We owe this much to future generations.
Advocacy & Policy
1. Research & Inquiry
We undertake quantitative and qualitative research into the para-academic sphere—mapping its contours, documenting its practices, and identifying emerging modes of knowledge production. Central to our work is understanding how prestige, value, and legitimacy are formed and distributed outside traditional academic institutions.
2. Policy Development
We are actively engaged in the development of policy proposals aimed at supporting para-academic ecosystems across local, state, and federal levels. Our policy work is grounded in evidence, informed by lived experience, and oriented toward practical, system-wide change.
3. Strategic Partnerships
FOPA is currently building strategic partnerships with a wide range of stakeholders—from independent researchers and artist-run initiatives to public institutions and philanthropic bodies. These collaborations are key to amplifying the visibility, sustainability, and impact of para-academic work.
4. Sector & Economic Analysis
FOPA analyses the economic conditions shaping the para-academic sphere—from funding streams and labour markets to resource distribution. We assess structural barriers, identify opportunities for sustainability, and design adaptable financing models blending public, philanthropic, cooperative, and earned-income streams, ensuring the sector remains vibrant, inclusive, and resilient.
Organisers
Lucie Loy
Matt Keyter
Merlyn Gwyther-McCuskey
Chris Simmonds
Nina Gibbes
Will Bennett
Dario Vacirca
Partners
Seventh Gallery
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nations as the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters on which FOPA gathers. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. As our work continues, we recognise the oldest continuing knowledge systems on Earth—held in Country, story, song and ceremony—and commit to working with, learning from, and taking seriously the question First Nations people perpetually pose: how does White Australia overcome the ontological sickness at the heart of its Settler Colony?
Contact
(e) contact@fopa.info
(i) @fopa_info
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