The Co-operative as Site of Pedagogy: The Example of Edinburgh Student Housing Co-operative

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore the relationship between housing co-operatives and education, examining the case of the Edinburgh Student Housing Co-operative, the largest of its kind in the UK. Drawing from our personal experience as members of student co-operatives, we show that co-operatives constitute not only an alternative way of managing, occupying and using goods such as housing but also important sites of learning that are fundamental for the constitution of a political subject. In this sense, they are new learning spaces. This subject lives by values that not only correspond to those identified by the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA, 2016) but also contrast and, in many ways, resist neoliberal and capitalist conceptions of the individual and education. Perhaps if we move away from notions of classroom education and its conceptions of teacher–student relationships and into other spaces in which subjects may pick up, learn and ‘internalize’ alternative conceptions of being and good living, we may gain a different understanding of education and how it can lead to the kind of transformation necessary for a fairer society. Student housing co-operatives, it is argued, push against the precarity of the neoliberal university for students, and make a valuable contribution to a Co-operative Higher Education ecosystem.