Urgent Pedagogies – Pelin Tan

Pelin Tan is a Turkish sociologist and art historian based in Mardin/Turkiye, and a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts and head of the Cultural Studies MA program at Batman University, Turkiye. As a researcher and author, she focuses on urban and territorial conflict, commons and labor conditions, alternative pedagogies and methodologies. Her practice and research are on border ecologies, threshold infrastructures in extractive zones, and urgent pedagogies. For 15 years, she has conducted research in the Southeast of Turkiye, Lebanon, Kurdistan, Palestine, and Iraq on non-extractivist practices and archives. She was a visiting professor at the School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2016); the Architecture Faculty, Nicosia, Cyprus (2018); and Bard College's Human Rights Program and Curatorial MA Program (2019- 2020). Between 2013 and 2017, Tan was an Associate Professor and Vice Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Mardin Artuklu University. Tan was the artistic director of Cosmological Gardens: Gardenutopia of Matera Cultural Capital Project (2018 - 2020). She was an associate curator of Adhocracy - 1.Istanbul Design Biennial (2012), Co-curator of Adhocracy: From Public to Commons, Onassis Foundation, 2015. Curator of Didier Faustino’s retrospective, MAAT Museum, Lisbon, 2024. Tan is a curatorial member of the board of IBA Stuttgart 2027. Tan is a member of Artıkİşler video collective and the Mardin-based Arazi Assembly collective of critical spatial practice. Her book: Forms of Non-Belonging, Sternberg Press&Eflux Books, 2026.

Urgent Pedagogies

Urgent Pedagogies is a project developed to create a space to highlight and discuss how socially engaged critical spatial practice may address urgent issues across different conflicts, and to examine the role of alternative pedagogies. Acting in relation to societal urgencies and situations of conflict demands the capacity to approach issues and contexts carefully, adopt different perspectives, and create strategies and settings for learning, unlearning, thinking together, and alternative forms of knowledge production and sharing. Moving beyond established institutional forms of research and teaching, and encouraging both old and new forms of learning, may help challenge social and political contexts shaped by hegemonic institutionalism, colonial legacies, and extractive capitalism. Alternatively, collectively initiated pedagogical platforms may be emancipative forms of action, care, solidarity, and resistance. Urgent Pedagogies was set up as a project and space for inquiry and dialogue to share knowledge and experience. It has focused on critical spatial practices; however, in both its research and distribution, it is a transdisciplinary project that connects various artistic practices, such as design, architecture, and spatial practice, with social movements, civil society, and activist initiatives. It aims to engage with practices and people from diverse experiences, situations, contexts, and geographies. Learning is also central to the project itself, through open-ended and experimental approaches, engaging with different perspectives, new encounters, and critical dialogues, and a growing network of alliances. In this talk the co-founders and curators Magnus Ericson and Pelin Tan will discuss the project as a curatorial, pedagogical, and spatial practice.