The conference aims to initiate a dialogue that includes teachers, students, artists, independent scholars, journalists, podcasters and content creators – voices operating both inside and beyond the academy – to explore alternative modes of theorising, teaching, and public engagement. In light of the ongoing transformations in the education sector, marked by the emergence of new enclosures of knowledge, privatisation and the accelerating AI-turn, radically impacting curricula, pedagogy, modes of research and intellectual labour, we observe an increasing obfuscation of the relation between techne (how knowledge is produced) and episteme (the frameworks and forms of knowledge that are produced). In attempting to bridge techne and episteme, the central question we pose is: who is the intellectual/ ‘expert’? And whose labour in knowledge production is and can be considered as constituting intellectual labour/ expertise? Papers presented at the conference will offer reflections that interrogate the manner in which different practitioners and sites – online archives, open-access journals, independent research collectives, podcasts, media platforms, to name a few – contribute to newer modalities of learning and awareness, radically altering and reconfiguring the ‘education’ landscape. The larger aim of the conference is to discuss spaces that allow critique and creativity to operate outside institutional settings.