Each year AntiUniversity takes over our building on 88 Fleet Street to host some of their amazing DIY programmes, and this year is no exception.
Check their 2025 programme here.
https://festival.antiuniversity.org/
Highlights from the programme at MDR
‘Resilience’ in a time of crisis with Red Therapy
Tuesday 14th October, 7pm
What might ‘resilience’ mean outside of individualism, productivity, and the imperative to ‘cope’? The language of “resilience” is everywhere, from online therapy accounts to workplaces and government campaigns. But in the midst of witnessing a genocide, a deepening cost of living crisis, and collapsing mental health services, resilience can feel like a demand to endure more with less.
This workshop invites a space to think together about what resilience might mean outside of individualism, productivity, and the imperative to ‘cope’. Drawing from radical and anti-institutional approaches to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, we’ll work through questions together like:
Who benefits from the current use of the word resilience?
How does the demand to be resilient show up in our bodies and relationships?
What might resilience look like collectively, rather than individually? What would a politicised resilience look like?
How do we name and politicise psychic pain without being pathologised?
What are the limits of psychotherapy at this moment, and where does it still hold possibilities?
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Red Therapy explores the relationship between the psychic and the social through theoretical engagement, political activity, and our own group dynamic. We were inspired by the 1970s London group of the same name, and are a building collective member at MayDay Rooms.
Sign up here
Archiving and Piracy – Talk and Workshop
Thursday 16 October at 16:00 – 18:00 AND
Saturday 18 October at 11:00 – 16:00
Big Tech is suffocating education. Early hopes that the internet would be a democratising force for education have been squandered in the face of profit. Tech companies are accused of scraping journal articles for AI training that remain behind a paywall for us, the non-academic public. We navigate the internet on large social media platforms in digital walled gardens, but this is not all there is.
For the past couple decades, shadow libraries and piracy have played a role in the battle for free and open access education. This series is designed to explore the principles and practical skills that could form the basis of personal pirate archiving to reclaim hopes that the internet could democratise education, now more important than ever. In moving outside the law, piracy provides an opportunity to think beyond the institution and more radically how education and archiving can work to promote open and free education.
This series is split into two sessions: problem and remediation. On Thursday, we will give a talk on Big Tech’s (re)structuring of information access online and its impact on personal education. On Saturday, we will host a practical workshop on archiving, peer-to-peer filesharing, and piracy. One of our aims is to equip non-technical people with more technical literacy in this area, so please don’t be shy if this is you! We would love to have you at both or either. Register at the links below, and if possible please bring a laptop to the Saturday session.
Thursday Talk
Saturday Full-Day Workshop