An Insurgent Decolonial Anarchist Unschooling

Every serious educator who has spent time inside a conventional institution must eventually confront the question of what exactly is being reproduced within its walls. Ivan Illich provided a precise answer in Deschooling Society in 1970. He argued that schooling functions as a modern institution that teaches people to confuse process with substance, credential with competence, and institutional service with genuine value. The student, Illich wrote, is “schooled to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” The school operates as a site of managed dependency where the imagination is trained to accept the institution’s definition of what counts as knowledge, who counts as a knower, and what counts as worth knowing.

The Institute for Intersectional Relational Studies (IIRS) was built in direct refusal of that logic.

IIRS operates as an insurgent intelligentsia organized around three imperatives that function simultaneously as a pedagogy, a politics, and a practice: EDUCATE | AGITATE | ORGANIZE. These three words provide a precise description of the institute’s core functions. To educate means providing rigorous, transdisciplinary knowledge that refuses to sanitize the political dimensions of its subject matter. To agitate means disturbing the comfortable assumptions that conventional professional training has deposited in the minds of practitioners. This involves naming the colonial architectures embedded in mainstream psychology, exposing the ethnocentric biases of clinical neuroscience, and refusing the false neutrality of “evidence-based practice” when that evidence has been produced by and for a narrow demographic. To organize means building a community of practitioners, researchers, artists, and thinkers who carry this work into the world as a lived commitment.

Founded and led by Nishita Rao, India’s first AASECT-Certified Sexuality Educator (CSE), IIRS operates as a Pillow Talk With Nixi™ initiative. It functions entirely as an online, distance-learning platform. The conventional university relies on a physical architecture of access, including the campus, the visa, the tuition, and the prerequisite credential. This structure ensures that the people most affected by the systems under study are among the least likely to be admitted to study them. IIRS refuses this architecture. Its commitment to a minimal carbon footprint and its tiered access model (Standard, Collective, Community, and Open) express the conviction that knowledge about power, bodies, and liberation must remain accessible.

At the heart of IIRS lies the claim that human relationalities cannot be understood through any single discipline and cannot be studied honestly without confronting the political conditions of knowledge production itself. IIRS studies sexuality in direct relation to colonialism. It studies neuroscience by asking whose brains have been studied, in whose interests, and with what cultural assumptions built into the methodology. It studies art by asking who was erased from the archive and why. Every course, module, and discourse traces the line from global events to cultural norms, and from colonial history to the intimate architectures of the self.

The disciplines IIRS draws from are deliberately expansive. Neuroscience sits alongside Dance Ethnography. Molecular Biology is in conversation with Postcolonial Theory. Political Science informs the reading of clinical psychology. Ethnomusicology illuminates the history of gender. This approach reflects intellectual honesty about the complexity of the phenomena under study. It also poses a direct challenge to the disciplinary fragmentation that the modern university uses to manage and contain radical inquiry. Jeff Shantz has observed in his analysis of anarchism in the academy that the division of knowledge into discrete professional disciplines serves as a mechanism for limiting the scope of questions that can be asked. It ensures that those questions remain safely within the bounds of what the institution and the economic interests it serves can tolerate.

The learners who come to IIRS are as diverse as the questions it asks. Licensed clinicians and certified sex educators come to fulfill AASECT Continuing Education requirements and to find a body of knowledge that reflects the actual complexity of the communities they serve. Therapists and counselors come to unlearn the Eurocentric frameworks installed by their professional training. Community members (BIPOC, queer, kink-positive, sex worker-affirming) come to find their own experiences reflected in rigorous scholarship rather than pathologized in clinical manuals. Researchers come to find methodological frameworks capable of holding the full weight of intersectional inquiry. Artists and activists come to find the theoretical grounding for work they have already been doing by instinct and necessity.

What they find at IIRS is a space designed to produce people whose will, spirit, and individuality can be realized, as Shaun Riley invokes in his analysis of capitalist education and learned helplessness. They find a space where the central question focuses on what the world needs them to understand.

The Need for IIRS

Fredy Perlman argues in The Incoherence of the Intellectual that the intellectual who separates knowledge from action is an active participant in the reproduction of the existing order. The separation of knowledge from action serves the interests of those who benefit from the existing order remaining unchanged.

IIRS refuses this separation. The PIRS Program is designed to produce people who practice intersectionality in their clinical work, research, community organizing, art, and daily relationships. The three imperatives (EDUCATE | AGITATE | ORGANIZE) are simultaneous dimensions of a single practice. To educate without agitating is to reproduce the existing order under the guise of knowledge transmission. To agitate without organizing is to produce frustration without transformation. To organize without educating is to build movements without the intellectual depth to sustain them.

The world in which IIRS’s students work is one where clinical practitioners are routinely trained in frameworks that pathologize the communities they are supposed to serve. The wellness industry has commodified the healing practices of colonized communities and sold them back at a premium. The neuroscience of trauma is used to individualize fundamentally political problems, and the politics of the body are systematically obscured by the depoliticized language of mental health.

Against this world, IIRS offers a rigorous, honest, politically committed education that takes seriously both the complexity of human experience and the urgency of the political conditions in which that experience unfolds. It offers education as revolution, as Wu Zhihui formulated in the anarchist tradition.

The question IIRS asks of every learner is the same question Robert Haworth asked himself: Am I doing something different here, or am I just reinforcing and reproducing the existing order? Every practitioner who is serious about their work must be willing to sit with, return to, and answer that question honestly.

IIRS exists to help them do that.