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HEdge Space is both the name of the research project and a site of creative radical learning. It borrows from the idea of the Hedge schools of 18th Century Ireland, places where people gathered illegally for unofficial educational purposes near hedges, rivers, overhanging rocks, in mud huts and chapels as a response to imperial occupation and the oppressive cultural colonisation (cultural hegemony) waged upon them during occupation (Lyons, 2016). This form of self-organised community education continues to be enacted as an informal learning and cultural practice by a diverse range of groups in Ireland encompassing, but not exclusive to, the arts, heritage and activism.

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In this public-pedagogy research HEdge space, the emancipatory practices of radical adult education and interventionist social practice art are woven together with the concept of permaculture and ecological edge effects.  This fusion of practice and ideas create a holistic learning-for-action assembly space. In this HEdge space people could gather together in outdoor locations (mostly) to engage in creative and holistic collective learning, and research, for social-environmental justice simultaneously. 

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IRadical adult education is concerned with the nature and purpose of knowledge and its capacity to oppress or liberate people. It fundamentally challenges hidden curriculum of formal schooling critiquing it as having an  oppressive socialisaing agenda to school people to accept the status quo. 

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Radical adult education non-accredited learning that happens outside of formal schooling curriculums for the purpose of bringing about social-environmental justice, for example, in social movement spaces, grassroots organizations.

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counter-hegemonic

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Holistic radical workshops at the HEdge create an assembly point for people to meet to explore learning-for-action to make social-ecological change. Its a space to build an intersectional eco-feminist counter-hegemonic culture to confront the hegemonic oppressive, destructive, extractive and exploitative cultures of patriarchal neoliberal capitalism.

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Emancipatory practices such as radical adult and community education, participatory action research and social practice art are all democratic, collaborative practices which support communities to voice and address issues affecting their lives and work towards transforming the conditions under which they are all living.  

 

In ecology, edge effects is the process by which newness and diversity is created by the meeting at the margins of two or more lifeforms, such as how fungi and algae together form lichens (Holmgren; PermaculturePrinciples.com; Haraway, 2016).

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​Edge effects in ecology can reflect creative meetings in the social world such as, the process by which  theory interacts with practice to produce new insight or  action, or how different ideas,  disciplines or materials interact or fuse to create something new. It can also reflect how the two halves of our bodies, the interior and exterior intertwine and engage perceptually with the world, and how people and the different facets of life, the social, ecological, economic, political, cultural, historical interact to create plural realities (Garoian, 2013; Lawrence, 2008; Lawrence, 2012; Merleau-Ponty and Lefort, 1968).

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Edge effects | Knowledge Base (permaculture.org.uk)

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