Learning by Trespass: Walking and Reading and Making commons in Sheffield

In this article, we consider a two-week workshop conducted with the European Architecture Student Assembly (EASA) in Sheffield in 2023 to reflect on how creative practices might be drawn on to learn about / learn the art of paying attention to the commons, and specifically in relation to land-rights in Sheffield and the Peak District in England. Following Linebaugh, we approach commons not as a thing or a noun but rather as made through a set of practices; something that is continuously made and unmade through creative practices. We are also guided by Stengers who instructs that we must ‘learn the art of paying attention to’ the commons. We draw these provocations together to reflect on the activities in which we engaged during the workshop - walking (+trespassing), reading (+mapping), making (+repairing) - and how, through a series of ‘encounters’, we fostered a particular bodily and emotional attunement to our experiences as a means to pay attention to commons. Through a close reading of what we did during the workshop and of a set of responses that were made by participants (pamphlets, videos and sound pieces), we explore how these activities through which we learnt about / learnt the art of paying attention to the commons were themselves productive of the commons. Moreover, the pamphlets and other responses did not only document what happened in the two weeks and what and how we learnt, but we argue that they were further generative as they open up questions, ways of critically thinking about what is taken for granted, imaginings and speculation.