aibia's analytical and (re)imaginative engine for rethinking democracy, economy, learning, and life... from the margins outward.
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What the Think Tank Is
The aibia Think Tank is the analytical, imaginative, and public facing extension of aibia global. It is where the experiences, tensions, experiments, and insights emerging from aibia's living laboratories and wider ecosystem are studied, interpreted, and developed into concepts, methods, publications, and practical interventions.
This is not a detached research institute, nor a conventional policy center. The Think Tank is designed as a space where thinking and doing remain connected. It moves between the grounded observation, theory-building, institutional experimentation, and collaborative knowledge production of the living labs, and towards public facing analysis and writing. It exists to make sense of what is already happening both in our own research projects, but also in the broader world - especially in places and communities too often treated as marginal - and to turn those lessons into tools for reimagining broader social, political, economic, and educational futures.
How It Connects to aibia’s Living Labs
The Think Tank is grounded in aibia's Living Laboratories and wider field-based work. Rather than treating practice as a simple example of pre-existing theory, aibia approaches its sites as places where new concepts, methods, and possibilities can emerge.
The Think Tank listens to what is happening in these spaces, thinks with them, and feeds insights back into them. In this sense, it operates as an ongoing iterative loop between lived experience and conceptual work. Lessons drawn from educational experiments, grassroots initiatives, prefigurative processes, governance practices, place-based struggles, and everyday forms of creativity are not only documented; they are analyzed, refined, and translated into outputs that can guide future practice and contribute to wider debates.
This is what makes the Think Tank different from a conventional academic center. Its work grows from real time grounded experimentation, from collaboration with people and places, and from a commitment to building alternatives rather than simply commenting on or critiquing their absence.
Our Pillars
The Think Tank is organized through a set of public-facing pillars. These are not rigid boxes, but entry points into a wider body of interconnected work.
Reimagining the Economy
This pillar examines capitalism, economic inequality, extraction, and the possibilities of building alternatives. It includes work on autonomous and parallel economies, post-capitalist futures, commons-based practices, needs-based provisioning, usage regimes, and different ways of organizing value, production, and distribution. It is concerned both with diagnosing and understanding existing economic systems and with exploring grounded alternatives already being practiced or imagined.
Another Democracy
This pillar explores democratic failure and democratic redesign. It asks what it would mean to take "rule by the people" seriously in a time when many political systems formally claim democracy while structurally excluding, diluting, or privatizing popular voice. Work in this pillar engages questions of democratic participation, prefigurative democracy, personal democratic voice, institutional redesign, degrees of caring, escalation, and the creation of more meaningful forms of collective decision-making.
Inner Areas
This pillar focuses on margins, rural zones, peripheral spaces, and so-called “inner areas” as sites of deeply rooted alternative practices, experimentation, knowledge production, and social reimagination. Rather than viewing such places only through decline or deficit, this work treats them as grounded spaces where alternative forms of life, cooperation, and regeneration can emerge. Inner and marginalized areas, ideas, and communities are not topics to be studied; they are also a method for thinking from the edges rather than from dominant centers.
Reimagining Learning
This pillar focuses on education, pedagogy, field-based learning, institutional experimentation, and the transformation of how knowledge is produced and shared. It includes work on experiential education, field schools, Living Laboratories, alternative academic models, and the long-term project of building more democratic, decolonial, and socially grounded forms of learning. It treats education not as a neutral delivery system, but as a political and institutional field that must itself be reimagined.
Daoist Social Theory
This pillar develops Daoist thought as a social and political theoretical resource rather than as a spiritual or wellness discourse. It engages questions of relationality, non-coercion, situated action, balance, autonomy, power, and the limits of rigid institutional and rationalist frameworks. In aibia’s work, Daoist social theory serves as one distinctive conceptual engine for thinking differently about governance, agency and resistance, economy, learning, and social life across the other pillars.
Lenses
While the pillars provide entry points, aibia’s work does not fit neatly into isolated categories. Democracy, economy, learning, space, and institutional life are deeply entangled. To reflect that, the Think Tank also works through a set of cross-cutting lenses that move across the pillars.
Parallel Structures
This lens explores how people build institutions, practices, spaces, and infrastructures alongside and beyond dominant systems. It is concerned with efforts not only to critique existing arrangements, but to create alternatives in practice.
Prefigurative Practice
This lens focuses on the attempt to live in the present while creating the future. It looks at how alternative forms of democracy, economy, education, and social organization can be lived, tested, and refined now within iterative feedback processes rather than planned and hoped for.
Autonomous Goods & Usage Regimes
This lens examines how goods, materials, spaces, and resources can be organized through use, care, contribution, and shared rights rather than strictly through ownership and market logics. It reflects AIBIA’s interest in how alternative economic and social relations are materially sustained.
Agency and Everyday / Quiet Resistance
This lens attends to dispersed, subtle, and often non-spectacular forms of action and resistance. It explores how people act and reshape systems not only through visible confrontation, but through everyday practices, attunement, refusals, adjustments, workarounds, and alternative ways of living.
Institution-Building & Governance Design
This lens focuses on how alternative organizations, rules, structures, and forms of collective coordination can be intentionally designed, tested, and revised. It includes practical work on governance, participation, organizational form, and institutional experimentation.
Outputs
The Think Tank develops and supports a range of outputs designed to move between local relevance and wider circulation. These outputs are intended to be useful both within aibia's own work and in broader conversations among researchers, communities, educators, activists, and institutions.
These include:
- white and working papers
- policy briefs and concept notes
- academic articles, chapters, and books
- public essays and interventions
- a web ecosystem for publishing real time reaction pieces
- toolkits, frameworks, and teaching materials
- films, podcasts, and other media projects
Some outputs are rooted directly in AIBIA’s Living Laboratories and partner sites. Others translate those grounded lessons into broader conceptual, institutional, or public-facing contributions. Together, they form part of a growing archive of critical reimaginative work.
Explore our developing outputs on the Outputs / White Papers page.
The Web Ecosystem
The Think Tank is also connected to a wider web ecosystem of public-facing domains and intellectual platforms. These sites allow ideas emerging through AIBIA’s work to circulate outward into broader debates.
This ecosystem currently includes:
- Alternative Ideas — public essays and interventions on politics, economy, culture, and global affairs
- Another Democracy — work on democratic redesign, participation, and political alternatives
- Interpreting Capitalism — critical analysis of capitalism, extraction, inequality, and economic transformation
- Reimagining Academia — reflections on higher education, institutional crisis, pedagogy, and alternative learning structures
- Daoist Insights — reflections on Daoist social theory, relationality, non-coercion, autonomy, and alternative ways of understanding everyday social and political life
Together, these platforms extend the Think Tank beyond a single page or project. They create a wider space for experimentation, publication, and public engagement.
Closing Invitation
The AIBIA Think Tank is a growing ecosystem for developing ideas that are grounded enough to matter and ambitious enough to open alternatives. It brings together place-based experimentation, conceptual work, public writing, and collaborative production in order to help rethink how we live, learn, govern, and build.
We invite you to explore the pillars, follow the outputs, engage the wider web ecosystem, and think with us as this work continues to evolve.
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