Commoning (Masha’eyyih) is a research and social practice collective formed in Beirut and working across the Levant. It was founded by a group of social scientists researching grassroots activism and artists whose work focuses on the ethics of representation in the current political climate.
Commoning was born in 2022 out of the urgency to respond to escalating hardships in the region, from the Lebanese economic collapse in 2019, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, the aftermath of the Beirut explosion, and the war on Gaza and Lebanon. Traversing different locales in the region, Commoning works on creating connections and exchanges between marginalized communities and activists through co-learning with the capacity to effectuate social and political change.
Commoning has established political and pedagogical relationships with student organizing groups, Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, women’s support groups, as well as agricultural workers. Through collaborative exploration and exchange, Commoning fosters co-learning opportunities, resources, and workshops that address the particular needs and aspirations of activists and grassroots organizations to support alternative models of organization and co-learning for liberation and research for action.
The collective has established an online platform, Akkoub, as an Arabic language knowledge sharing resource aimed for activists in the region. Akkoub aims to offer open-access and collectively authored resources about alternative/collaborative ways of working, convening, and learning. The resources available on Akkoub range from reflections on anti-colonial literature to material analysis of local committees in the region and their function in times of revolution and tools for self-organization around the idea of the commons.
The collective also regularly organizes workshops and convenings around collective reading, open discussions, film screenings, and more, with the communities it works with. The aim of these meetings is to create and sustain spaces that are discursive, rigorous, politically driven, and socially anchored, that are outside of urban centers and which include communities with almost no access to education, culture, and art, such as farmers, migrant communities, and organizers, among others.
