Transcript
Speaker: In different countries, it's always repeated two things.
Speaker: So first, the dystopian city is always poetic.
Speaker: So kids start to invent all kinds of crazy things like vampires.
Speaker: It's all very much poetry.
Speaker: But utopian city is very practical.
Speaker: They always try to solve practical problems.
Speaker: They're like, okay,
Speaker: We don't want to have hungry people.
Speaker: Where are we going to produce food?
Speaker: What kind of food are we going to produce?
Speaker: Like these kids in Amsterdam, they will like really spend a lot of time negotiating between each other.
Speaker: Should we have farms with animals?
Speaker: And who will kill them?
Speaker: Or they will just become all vegetarian, you know?
Speaker: So that was like a big topic of discussion.
Speaker: But they were like super practical.
Speaker: Hello and welcome to episode 167 of our podcast here at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: My name is Nick Covington.
Speaker: Before we get started, I want to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Julia Valenti, Kimberly Baker, and Brandon Peters.
Speaker: Thank you all so much for your ongoing support.
Speaker: And with the help of teacher-powered schools, so-called Moran partners, Stimpunks, and What School Could Be, the lineup for our fourth annual virtual conference to restore humanity is complete, focused this year on the quest for connection, running from July 21st to the 23rd.
Speaker: Between now and then, with each episode, we'll briefly spotlight one of our conference keynotes, workshops, and panel discussions.
Speaker: For 90 minutes on Tuesday, July 22nd, join V. Dow, Sociologist and Director of Learning and Practice at Cortico, Shaina V. White, Director of CS Equity Initiatives at the Kapoor Foundation, Charles Logan, PhD student at Northwestern University, and Audrey Waters.
Speaker: creator of Hack Education, writer of The Second Breakfast newsletter, and author of Teaching Machines.
Speaker: As we try to answer the question, what, if anything, should be the relationship of AI and ed tech to education?
Speaker: I'll be leading the panel in a Q&A with questions from the audience, and it should be a great conversation.
Speaker: If that sounds interesting, tickets for the whole conference start at just 50 bucks, and you can find the full lineup at humanrestorationproject.org slash conference.
Speaker: My guest today is Nika Dubrovsky.
Speaker: Nika is an artist and writer whose work has been exhibited internationally.
Speaker: Her children's books have been translated into several languages, and remarkably, as you'll hear in the episode, Nika is directly responsible for bringing Russian translations of Dr. Seuss to post-Soviet Russia.
Speaker: Nika is also the co-creator of Anthropology for Kids, alongside her late husband, anthropologist, best-selling author, and activist David Graeber, who passed away suddenly in 2020.
Speaker: A4Kids.org is an open source platform which experiments with new educational formats.
Speaker: After David's passing, Nika also founded the David Graeber Institute as a platform to develop ideas and projects that continue his legacy.
Speaker: Most of NECA's projects are dedicated to the building and maintaining of social relationships, among which are the Museum of Care, a nomadic anti-institute, and the Playground of the Future, a collaborative and interactive art project imagining playgrounds as a space of collectivity and care.
Speaker: Playgrounds are vital public spaces, she writes.
Speaker: They bring communities together, bridging generations and social divides.
Speaker: They're also about fun and play, which is exactly the kind of atmosphere we need when making collective decisions.
Speaker: A network of community-built playgrounds designed around visual assemblies could become spaces where people gather, play, and make decisions together.
Speaker: Thank you so much for joining me today, Nika.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: So before we get into the incredible projects that you have been involved with and the plans that you must have for the future, you were born in the former Soviet Union.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I left when the Soviet Union was still together.
Speaker: It was 1989.
Speaker: So I left a town called Leningrad.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm a little bit like I left a country that didn't exist, the city that didn't exist.
Speaker: Soviet Union was my motherland and the big part of what formed me.
Speaker: And that's a big part of the project Anthropology for Kids that is based on the ideas of the Soviet literature, avant-garde Soviet literature.
Speaker: And you write about your childhood growing up there.
Speaker: I read the wonderful little biography you have on your website that
Speaker: I was never sure, I was sure I was never going anywhere.
Speaker: And you have several excerpts on the site about your adolescence and your experience at school.
Speaker: You say, I was a serious girl, studied a lot.
Speaker: The characteristic they gave me at school was, she is withdrawn, has no friends.
Speaker: engaged only and exclusively in art projects for public work, politely but firmly refuses.
Speaker: And you say, I'm still proud of that piece of paper.
Speaker: And I'm incredibly curious, and I'm sure listeners are too, about that background and to hear you speak about some experiences that most shaped you, be they inside of school or outside of it.
Speaker: outside of school, of course.
Speaker: And it's very interesting how the word activist changed if you compare it in Soviet Union.
Speaker: Because in Soviet Union, the public sphere was totally organized by administration and by officials.
Speaker: And there was no freedom or privacy in this public sphere.
Speaker: So in Soviet times, a lot of artists and a lot of public space, what we call now,
Speaker: would exist in private spaces like Soviet kitchen.
Speaker: That's where people feel themselves free and liberated.
Speaker: And a lot of ritual practices came out of Soviet Union, like apartment art exhibitions or self-made magazines called Samozdat.
Speaker: and other cultural institutions, I would say, that was formed to preserve and to develop freedom and reproduction of culture.
Speaker: So it was a very strange combination of private and public in the Soviet Union, very different from the US.
Speaker: And you had mentioned the Anthropology for Kids books sort of began as a reaction to those books that you experienced growing up.
Speaker: There's another great excerpt I pulled out here that says, what horrible children's books are published in Russia?
Speaker: Nasty, glossy pictures, hyper-drawn illustrations that are the worst mixture of advertising drawings on kafir and half-forgotten ideas about cartoon childhood.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I'm so curious then about how those memories of those horrible children's books influence the art that you create today and your work with Anthropology for Kids.
Speaker: This is very interesting.
Speaker: Maybe I should revisit the biography that I put on my website because actually Soviet children's literature and Soviet children's books was brilliant.
Speaker: Despite the fact that the Soviet Union was quite a suppressive regime, they produced an amazing Soviet literature.
Speaker: But after Soviet Union collapsed,
Speaker: and then Perestroika came and the wild market came as well, then the post-Soviet Russian literature was a disaster.
Speaker: And that's exactly the time when I had kids.
Speaker: And my kids were born outside of Russia or Soviet Union, but I wanted to share my culture with them.
Speaker: So I started to buy these books and started to read it to my kids.
Speaker: And then I was horrified.
Speaker: And I said, no, no, no, no.
Speaker: I have to make my own because this is very bad.
Speaker: And I was also living in the US at that time.
Speaker: So that's when I started to read Dr. Seuss.
Speaker: And that was amazing.
Speaker: And that was another project that I did.
Speaker: I bought the rights and I published Dr. Seuss in Russia in Russian.
Speaker: Just to want to share with my former Russian fellows the great, great literature that I found in the US.
Speaker: That is incredible.
Speaker: So is it safe to say that a Russian translation of Dr. Seuss exists because of you then?
Speaker: Yes, yes.
Speaker: I wasn't a translator, but in this case, I was a publisher and producer of this project.
Speaker: But definitely it was a lot of research and absolutely a lot of work.
Speaker: My work was putting into that.
Speaker: It's also for me was in the research project trying to merge the...
Speaker: Soviet literature and American literature and to try to find these differences and similarities.
Speaker: Dr. Seuss was published once in 1960s by the Soviet children's writer called Tchukhovsky, who was
Speaker: who was born before revolution.
Speaker: So that was still this early Russian avant-garde Soviet literature that was very close to Dr. Seuss, who is absolutely amazing author for me.
Speaker: I was so proud to bring it to Russia.
Speaker: Yeah, that is such an awesome accomplishment.
Speaker: What an awesome thing to be able to attribute yourself to.
Speaker: I also think Dr. Seuss is a very rare author now because his children's literature was absolutely political.
Speaker: So he was just writing anti-war books and climate change books, you know, and so on and so forth.
Speaker: And it also was very folk, you know, so it's like so much, for me, the beauty of English language is all in Dr. Seuss.
Speaker: It's almost like singing.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Amazing person.
Speaker: And I'm also curious then too, Nika, getting past the growing up that you had in the Soviet Union, obviously you've traveled the world, had these wonderful experiences.
Speaker: What values and ideas most influence your world and your work today or in the course of your life?
Speaker: So here I should say that before I met David, I didn't really know what is anthropology.
Speaker: And yeah, and then he was, so I met him after he was kicked out of Yale, when he appeared on his first TV program with Charlie Rose.
Speaker: And then he was writing, in that moment, 5,000 years of death, that he was sending me chapter by chapter in board.
Speaker: And that was like, I was reading that and it's literally changed my old perspective.
Speaker: And I also was wondering what could be a good education for my kids in general, because human beings is all about reproduction of culture.
Speaker: And then I was like, yeah, so this is how it should be actually, you know, this, you have to share people, um, not a one culture and one perspective, but of course you should share the same core value through the lenses of, um,
Speaker: of different cultures.
Speaker: And so from Soviet Union, I think the major things that was also in Soviet literature is internationalism.
Speaker: So despite the fact that Soviet Union was an empire, it's still
Speaker: was carrying out all these anti-colonial international values, at least declaring them.
Speaker: And this declaration was happening through children's literature.
Speaker: And the things that would be censored in the adult literature would still exist in the children's literature.
Speaker: So that's why this was a very unique moment for children's literature to bloom.
Speaker: And that's a fascinating transition to speaking directly to the work that you and David collaborated on for Anthropology for Kids.
Speaker: It describes itself as re-describing essential aspects of human life in simple terms, accessible for everyone,
Speaker: challenging people to reconsider who we are and how we see ourselves in others.
Speaker: And for the benefit of our listeners, I'll just describe a little bit of what it is.
Speaker: There are these wonderful free downloadable doodle books with incredible illustrations that you and David co-wrote.
Speaker: They're act-
Speaker: sort of as invitations for kids to explore and recreate these ideas.
Speaker: There's titles like Cities Made Differently, What Are Kings?
Speaker: There's one that challenges kids to invent a new nation together and think about where nationality comes from.
Speaker: They reflect on school and when and how schools were created.
Speaker: It's such a fun resource.
Speaker: It's a joyful resource.
Speaker: And it's one that we at HRP first encountered when we were working on our global interdisciplinary curriculum.
Speaker: that we made a few years ago and sort of stuck with us since.
Speaker: How did that project get started between you and David and what were its goals and mission at the time?
Speaker: So I think David is a teacher mostly.
Speaker: So he was always an academia and he was a really, really good teacher in a way that he was absolutely not suppressive and really not snobbish.
Speaker: And that's, you can see it in his books.
Speaker: And so that's, yeah, first time I encountered this guy who was totally smart, absolutely, like, absolutely genius, but he also was like,
Speaker: super eye to eye you know very supportive and yeah i i just talked to uh yesterday to one person who a student in fact who just wrote me an email describing how he fell in love with david how he uh he encountered his books and they changed his life and so on so forth and i just was thinking okay generally we can tell
Speaker: about family members or about loved ones that changed our lives.
Speaker: They mean the world for us.
Speaker: Actually, they did it to so many people around the world.
Speaker: So many people can tell it about him.
Speaker: So the anthropology for kids was just, I was thinking, okay, how I can connect it to myself.
Speaker: What can I contribute to all of this?
Speaker: enormous new world that I opened through his text and through being in touch with him.
Speaker: And also I had a son who was very small back then.
Speaker: And I was just doing projects with him and for him.
Speaker: And that's how it's all merged.
Speaker: And I also should say that I was living in New York in Lower East Side.
Speaker: And suddenly not only David, but a bunch of my friends was anthropologists around me.
Speaker: like Anna Bernstein, who is now a professor at Harvard, and Niko Davidov, who is also a professor at New York University.
Speaker: So we all were like kind of young, I'm an artist, and they were like anthropologists and a bunch of other people.
Speaker: So anthropology, that's become probably a buzz at that time in the very early 2000s.
Speaker: It's kind of an unexpected through line that I wasn't anticipating to come up with this conversation, but it's like your involvement in work that's directly targeted towards kids.
Speaker: I mean, I didn't know about this Dr. Seuss story.
Speaker: Would you say that that's influenced by, you know, your own experiences as a child and a parent and education and the resources you would want your own kids to have access to or what you wish you had access to as a child?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I actually read so much about Dr. Tews.
Speaker: I was surprised to find out that his books were kicked out of the libraries, you know, like Cat in a Hat was really like...
Speaker: average Americans didn't like it.
Speaker: He wasn't able to find a publishing house.
Speaker: Random House was so tiny.
Speaker: The only way Dr. Seuss is with us is because of his commercial success.
Speaker: Schools, libraries, all the government institutions didn't like him.
Speaker: I want to repeat now and make a mistake.
Speaker: I don't want to say that average Americans didn't like him.
Speaker: I want to say that American
Speaker: institution in these times didn't like him.
Speaker: That's what I want to say.
Speaker: And I don't know, you probably, I'm not now, but maybe I should say my admiration for Dr. Seuss too, because his first book was published as a reversal textbook, because in that time in America, in the US, some crazy lobby one that was trying to teach kids to read books
Speaker: with non-phonetical ways, so they just remember the words as they were Chinese hieroglyphs.
Speaker: And so that's why in this cat in the hat, he's using, I think, 203 or 220 words.
Speaker: But what he did with that, he created songs, and this is subversive songs, and it's very mind-blowing.
Speaker: And that's why he was kicked out of the libraries, because
Speaker: librarians would say that, you know, what is that?
Speaker: Where are the moms?
Speaker: Where are actually moms?
Speaker: And why did she go away?
Speaker: You know, and who is this thing?
Speaker: It's one thing too.
Speaker: That sounds like really like not okay.
Speaker: And yeah, and so I think it's just was so brilliant that by being so
Speaker: amazingly beautiful and taking a route in very deep folk American culture.
Speaker: It can push it way through all the censorship that also exists there.
Speaker: And I hope our books will do the same.
Speaker: We still cannot find a publisher in English for what are kings.
Speaker: These books didn't publish.
Speaker: Also, pirates didn't publish.
Speaker: But the MIT book, Cities Made Differently, it was sold out.
Speaker: The whole copies were sold out in 20 days.
Speaker: So now it's a second round.
Speaker: So I just...
Speaker: And it's a quite expensive book to buy that I'm not happy with.
Speaker: But yeah, it looks like it's doing very well on the market.
Speaker: And in this case, market maybe will help us once in a while.
Speaker: It is fascinating to think about how subversive Dr. Seuss was in his own time and to think about the evolution of culture and our perspectives on childhood.
Speaker: You don't really see childhood as a place of
Speaker: exploration and subversion of topics.
Speaker: It's mostly fantastical or otherworldly.
Speaker: And I think that's where, you know, the anthropology for kids work really brings, it brings the joy, the exploration, the re-imagination space that kids have in droves to actual real world topics to ask kids to invent and reinvent institutions.
Speaker: Why do you think that publishers won't
Speaker: take on what are kings and won't publish a third round of the cities and everything else like that.
Speaker: Why is there such a lack?
Speaker: They didn't publish immediately the first round, but city made differently.
Speaker: They removed everything about kids.
Speaker: This is not a kid's book anymore.
Speaker: And it's not a Doodle book.
Speaker: It's just Cities Made Differently published by MIT.
Speaker: Thanks very much that they did it.
Speaker: And so they sold all the first run of the books and they immediately published another one.
Speaker: white publishers didn't publish children's books publishers.
Speaker: So my understanding, you have like a big mainstream publishers who just want to publish books about kittens and, you know, flowers and so on.
Speaker: And then you have a niche publishers.
Speaker: You do have them in the U.S. and an English-speaking world book about like gay rights and, you know, whatever.
Speaker: But it's never, it's never coming to the, like,
Speaker: We didn't want to do a niche books.
Speaker: David and I wanted to do books that will be for everyone, you know, like an anthropology is for everyone because the major attempt of anthropology is try to figure out how we similar to each other with keeping our differences.
Speaker: So it's not like the book for the leftist kids, you know, or for the right kids.
Speaker: It's, it's try to, it's try to make bridges.
Speaker: Yeah, I think there's just such like a dirt, there's such a lack of actual substantive nonfiction material for children.
Speaker: It's a real fascinating topic that I wasn't expecting to get to unpack with you today.
Speaker: I wonder too, Nika, about just perspectives generally about education.
Speaker: I mean, David was quoted as saying, revolution happens when there's a transformation of common sense.
Speaker: And that, of course, we're all in this process of mutual creation together.
Speaker: I'm curious, too, about your own perspectives about the relationships between students, teachers, and schools, perhaps coming out of that anthropology for kids exploration.
Speaker: What should learning in society look like in your mind?
Speaker: I just come back from Amsterdam where in the Central Library we did a workshop with kids about city of care, so build the city together.
Speaker: This was extremely interesting.
Speaker: The kids were from seven to 12 years old.
Speaker: But I would say each of them already had a formed political opinion.
Speaker: They didn't pronounce it, nobody asked them, but they did have.
Speaker: And I can give you an example of what was the topics to discuss between them.
Speaker: But another thing was very interesting that when I'm doing these workshops with kids, almost none of them had an experience of how to work together and how to make a...
Speaker: decisions together.
Speaker: This is like the first thing and then life happens.
Speaker: So when this workshop is generally started from
Speaker: Each kid is drawing from their own side of a pre-prepared big piece of paper.
Speaker: And then that's worked very well because everybody likes to draw their cows.
Speaker: So if it's a playground, something that they're going to play with.
Speaker: But then they have to go out, they have to do shopping, they need roads, and then they encounter other people and then they need to negotiate.
Speaker: other people on the same table, how they will build this social space together.
Speaker: And they don't know how to do that because in schools, in every institution, they trained how to compete, how to become better than others.
Speaker: But nobody's
Speaker: providing them with the space where they actually can do things with others.
Speaker: And that's like the major survival skills for every human being.
Speaker: That's what we should teach children and ourselves to do.
Speaker: Are there plans to bring City of... Is this the first time that you've done a City of Care with kids?
Speaker: Are there plans to bring this to a bigger audience outside of Amsterdam?
Speaker: No, I did it in many countries actually.
Speaker: You can see on the website and it was done in Iceland and in Berlin.
Speaker: But maybe so, it's always like an artistic project that I'm doing.
Speaker: And now what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to print these maps and find the partners who will just print them or download them from the website where I'm going to put them and do it themselves and start to do it on their own because this is, in a way, you can look at this as an educational technique that people are welcome to use.
Speaker: And it's still be great to find some organization or some group of people who will help to facilitate that and will be able to do it in their own communities.
Speaker: Because I absolutely convinced that this is a crucial knowledge.
Speaker: And it's also like a lot of fun.
Speaker: So kids love to do that, especially like I didn't do it in Amsterdam this time.
Speaker: It was a utopian city, the city of care.
Speaker: But generally what's working really well, if you put
Speaker: two tablecloths i call them one is dystopian and with the proposal to build a city that you don't want to leave and then another one is utopian and then this is like such an amazing relationship between these two groups of people kids and now the way how they react to to that and what is in their minds place that they don't want to be in
Speaker: and it's very interesting that in different countries it's always repeated two things so first the dystopian city is always poetic so kids start to invent all kind of like crazy things like vampires you know like it's it's all very much a poetry but utopian city is very practical they always try to solve practical problems they're like okay
Speaker: don't want to have hungry people where we're going to produce food what kind of food we're going to produce like these kids in amsterdam they will like really spend a lot of time negotiating between each other should we have farms with animals and they who will kill them or they will just become all vegetarian you know so that was like a big topic of discussion but they were like super practical like how do we deal with trash
Speaker: how we can deal with the migrants if they come, if they build such a great city.
Speaker: All these people come, so what are we going to do?
Speaker: The kids in Amsterdam are a multiracial city.
Speaker: They suddenly start to tell something that,
Speaker: We will let them stay for two years, but then they have to leave.
Speaker: That was one of the concepts.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, they invented temporary visas.
Speaker: So that was a lot of fun.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: And they essentially build these side by side.
Speaker: So just visually, you can get the sense of comparison and just kind of reflect on that together as they're going through it.
Speaker: Is that the process?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So cool.
Speaker: How neat to watch.
Speaker: How long does it take them to go through that and collaborate and do that all together?
Speaker: What's the timeline?
Speaker: It depends on the kids, of course.
Speaker: But so because I did it in many different settings, like in Iceland, for example, we got a grant from Ministry of Culture.
Speaker: So my partner was an Icelandic artist and also quite famous rock star.
Speaker: So everybody knew him and he also knew how to control the crowds.
Speaker: So Icelandic government gave us a little plane.
Speaker: So we were like flying through these different villages, starting from Rikjavik and then in different places.
Speaker: And so it's an isolated places.
Speaker: Kids have nothing to do.
Speaker: So they make us to do like one workshop was with, I think, 200 kids.
Speaker: They just bring them from all different places together.
Speaker: So we put them in the different tables.
Speaker: And then while they were like drawing,
Speaker: the city that they want to leave, we ask them to move to the other people's table and then rearrange the rules.
Speaker: And that was also like really strange social exercise because, for example, one group of kids
Speaker: The boys immediately said that the woman would not have rights in this city.
Speaker: And Iceland is like a famous feminist place, you know, they have like a first female prime minister.
Speaker: And so the girls immediately said, oh, okay, so no kids.
Speaker: This is the border.
Speaker: This is a part of the town for the female.
Speaker: That's out of you live alone.
Speaker: but then uh we move them uh to another table and then somebody else came some other group and they were rearranging their rules i reflected on this other kids was saying so i it's it's many ways to do that and i think if it's hopefully will spread i mean other groups will invent their own rules how to how to arrange the social situation but it's also you have to think about physical part so kids
Speaker: Even as 12 years old, they don't want to stay in the same place more than an hour.
Speaker: So with a lot of trying out, I figured out that one hour is like the best time to spend.
Speaker: But then you can invite another group in the same place.
Speaker: sometime later or hour later and they can do it, you know.
Speaker: So that would be like the best.
Speaker: So ideally, I think, in my opinion, every school should have some place in the lobby or library where they have the special place where the kids can elaborate, fantasize, comment on the social places they build together.
Speaker: That will be super useful for the students, you know.
Speaker: and for the teachers, I think, for humans.
Speaker: That is so fascinating.
Speaker: We will have to have a sidebar conversation about the city of care because I'm so fascinated by this and bringing that to other places.
Speaker: And I think that's a great bridge to build into another thing that I was looking at.
Speaker: One of the exhibits that you have in the Museum of Care is about playgrounds.
Speaker: And you say the playground is an amazing way that gathers the hopes and despair of today's society, perhaps much more than any other public art project.
Speaker: because it needs fewer resources to build and is immediately accessible to the public.
Speaker: And we had met a few weeks ago to talk about developing a playground project that seems aligned to this idea.
Speaker: So I guess as an artist in the scope of your work, where does your interest in playgrounds come from and where do you hope that project will lead?
Speaker: Is that related to the City of Care idea?
Speaker: Yeah, definitely because playground is such a... So ideally you want it to not to go to the school, the place for visual assembly.
Speaker: You want to build it in the middle of the playground because playground is like a desirable place.
Speaker: School is not always something where kids want to go.
Speaker: And yeah, I have a long interest in the playground.
Speaker: Also as a mom, many moms spent, or many parents spent hours and hours in the playground.
Speaker: And often they're annoyed about what they see and they want to rearrange it and fantasize about that.
Speaker: So of course, there is a whole theory that's slowly building up.
Speaker: And also recently, my friend, Joanna Warschau,
Speaker: did this big exhibition in Gropius Bau in Berlin that's called Radical Playground, where she invited artists from many different countries that did projects about playgrounds.
Speaker: So the exhibition was outside of the museum and for quite some time people were able to visit and use the exhibition.
Speaker: So this exhibition was suffering from the very specific problem
Speaker: It has too many people who want to visit it.
Speaker: I just was in New York and this exhibition called Luna Luna.
Speaker: It's an exhibition about a project in the 70s in Germany about construction of Lunafark, like an amusement park.
Speaker: uh and it's also has so many people so i think people i wanted to to build together to be part of something fun and collective and that's how we have hope to to solve most of our problems so yeah like playgrounds is um kind of a bigger longer term and like a dream project how to how to build up on top of all these experiences in uh um
Speaker: Yeah, this radical playground project, this exhibit looks so cool.
Speaker: And I think what I so appreciate about your perspective, and the one that you co-created with David as well through all of this is just like, again, that idea that this reimagination isn't, it is on the one hand, you know, serious academic, you know,
Speaker: There's a discourse and a dialogue happening there, but it's also playful, joyful, you know, collaborative, collective work of play and getting through this together.
Speaker: And I think the more that we can embrace those things in schools and public places, in places where kids and adults can
Speaker: congregate, collaborate, reflect together.
Speaker: So often those spaces are separated, right?
Speaker: Adults go on the one side and do serious adult work and kids are out on the playground playing.
Speaker: And very rarely do those spaces intersect.
Speaker: And it sounds like you're headed in a direction and a vision where it's like bringing those playful, imaginative spaces together.
Speaker: So looking ahead to the future, what
Speaker: What's next?
Speaker: I mean, we've talked about anthropology for kids, the museum of care, the city of care.
Speaker: Where do you imagine the next five years of Nika Dubrovsky going?
Speaker: What's the next big thing?
Speaker: Yeah, so I'm doing the series of books.
Speaker: So the first book was City Made Differently and the second book will be Museums Made Differently.
Speaker: So a collection of the social situation.
Speaker: Museums is about collection where value created.
Speaker: Why do we find something valuable so it should go to a museum and something should go to a trash bin.
Speaker: And the third book is about Artists Made Differently.
Speaker: So it's about different ideas of what is human being.
Speaker: So artist as a business person, artist as an activist, artist as a philosopher or artist as a madman.
Speaker: That's a very common Western idea actually about artists.
Speaker: And then I'm working on a book with Michael Hudson.
Speaker: a very good friend of David about times made differently.
Speaker: So that's a fascinating project.
Speaker: So mostly I hope to write books, but I also hope to have partners who will help to organize the playground project, visual assembly project.
Speaker: So make my work not private, but more, you know, collective and in the real world.
Speaker: So, you know, change life of people to the best, hopefully.
Speaker: And if people wanted to reach out to help or get involved or learn more about any of the projects that we've been talking about, what would be like the best way for them to do that?
Speaker: So one of the things we are running is David Graber Institute, David Graber Institute website, where now actually a lot of volunteers are congregated.
Speaker: So we hope to
Speaker: yeah, to make this project collective.
Speaker: And then anthropology for kids, a4kids.org is mostly a site where the free resources about anthropology for kids series is distributed.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much, Nika, for taking the time to chat with me today.
Speaker: Thank you very much for inviting me.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project.
Speaker: I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change.
Speaker: If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player.
Speaker: Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org.
Speaker: Thank you.
