I skipped last week’s reflection, as I was on a retreat. Before you dock me a few points hear me out, there’s a sense in which this retreat is field research for my project. The leader Bonnitta Roy is an independent scholar and philosopher who runs an online Zoom/Substack philosophy community called The Pop-Up School. This retreat, on “Cultivating the Natural State” was an in-person gathering in rural Vermont of primarily people in the the Pop-Up School’s community.

Roys community is interesting on many levels. She’s doing work which is academic in flavour, but because she does not have the constraints that the conventional academic discipline might impose, so there is also the feeling that you’re participating in something new. Something that doesn’t fit into the existing boxes, but perhaps rhymes with them.

A theme of the retreat was on “left-brain right-brain integration”, and this was reflected in its content which would run from embodiment exercises and group music jamming, all the way to very verbal and diagrammatic expositions of Roy’s ongoing metaphysics development project. Her interests span this range, and therefore so does the community she attracts. The attendees were striking in their breadth, we had people in their 20s and people in their 70s, we had German web developers, fourth generation Idaho herbalists, Haitian-Canadian community activists, academics, recovering housewives and recovering 1960s acid-heads.

My father quit his second tenured academic job to enter industry in my early childhood (the inability to focus runs deep in this family). One thing he told me he appreciated when he left academia was precisely the diversity of folks he would work with. He went from leading labs of exclusively 20-30-something technological-neurotype keeners who had always been top of their class to being in orgs with Japanese salespeople and ex-military folk and future librarians and technical writers and marketing gurus and alcoholic entrepreneurs.

Sons are cursed to rebel against their fathers while ultimately just playing out the ongoing oscillation of the same dielectics. I have spent more of my adult life in industry, never quite figuring out the academic path, (though perhaps it was just an easier path for those coddled boomers), and so the longing for me, the longing which has led me to pursuing this fellowship in the first place, has been away from the economic imperative which is the totalizing frame of industry. Academia is the other obvious pole for people of my type—yes there is a huge negative space of other things I’m leaving out, non-profits, healthcare, government, art, military, activism, crime, marrying rich, but these are not on the particular samsara loop of my lineage.

So this is why Roy’s subculture is fascinating to me. She is running a community of teaching and learning, but it is not just a re-hashing of the existing institutions. She does not have that monocultural tendency which ultimately disheartened my father. She is very comfortable with trans- or perhaps even anti-disciplinary engagement. She’s not attracting “the usual suspects” of participants. She’s not chasing “the usual metrics”. There’s something new she’s trying.

I will see if I can interview her as part of my research. Understand whether she has a theory of pedagogy. A theory of knowledge production.

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