Kenneth White, Dwelling and Nomadism: a geopoetic education for the twenty-fi rst century

In his The Wanderer and his Charts (2004) Kenneth White offers two crucial texts that serve at once to 'educate and to initiate' (Bissell 2005: 37) his readers into a project a lifetime in the making: in one of these texts he introduces us to 'The Nomadic Intellect' while the in the other he provides 'An Outline of Geopoetics'.The term 'geopoetics' -which is not to be confused with 'geopolitics' -started to enter into White's 'texts and talks at the end of the 1970s', after a long period of what he describes as 'intellectual nomadism'.He adopted this term in order to articulate not only a fi eld that was opening up in his own intellectual trajectory but also to outline a 'potential general space' that would be 'concerned with the cultivation of a live and life-enhancing world by self-developing individuals' (White 2003: vii, 6).Nomadic; geopoetic: as an educator White has been a creator of groups which, while recognising that education has never been 'so ubiquitous', it is nevertheless somehow 'lacking' (Bartlett and Clemens 2017: 1), and have therefore attempted to create 'new organisations, with new thematics and new perspectives' (Bissell 2005: 37) outside the university, groups that are truly 'universal' in aspiration.The International Institute of Geopoetics, the most recent of these groups, was founded 19 years ago (1989), and has sites located as far apart as New Caledonia, Chile, Scotland and Sweden. 1 Opening its doors to established academics and artists and also to those with no formal qualifi cations or artistic status, but who nevertheless share in its concerns, the Institute of Geopoetics operates in terms that might be expressed well with reference to Jacques Rancière's exploration of the axiom of Joseph Jacotot in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, namely, that 'the same intelligence is at work in all the productions of the human mind' (Rancière 1991: 18; Deranty 2010: 7).The equality of intelligence that would ground White's 'active culture' is qualitative, not numerical, in Rancière's sense: it is an