Katherine K. Chen — Burning Man in the Default World? Learning Communities at Burning Man & a Democratic School

What could Burning Man’s principles and practices look like in the default world? I compare the activities of two learning communities using (1) on-going participant-observations and observations of the activities of Agile Learning Center (ALC), a small, democratic school, and (2) participant-observations, observations, interviews, and archival research collected between 1998 through 2001, with follow-up research through 2012, of the organization behind the annual Burning Man event. This talk focuses on how prefigurative organizing practices can enable members to realize their individual and collective interests while also interrogating potential inequalities generated by organizational processes. Burning Man leaders used pre-meeting conversations to expand decisionmaking by consensus and also emphasized members’ taking action through “do-ocracy.” Similarly, ALC augmented democratic processes by encouraging routinized, reflexive experimentation during deliberation and everyday activities. Through such democratic practices, members of both communities not only learn how to exercise voice, but also to productively pursue individual and collective interests.