How to spell the fight | Natascha Sadr Haghighian

*NOTE: We only have the arabic edition of this title

James R. Murphy, a math teacher in La Guardia, New York, regarded mathematics as the most powerful and manipulable abstract language available to humans. To acquaint students who don’t “like” math with abstract and systematical thinking, he put a piece of string in their hands and taught them to make string figures.

How to spell the fight follows a thread that has been running through our fingers from centuries past till the present day, morphing from the tangible string figures that join our hands in childhood to the more elusive computational algorithms that engage our fingers today. Following this line of inquiry through various twists and turns, a conversation about collective agency emerges with the aim of rethinking current paradigms of cognition, education, and power.

Text by Natascha Sadr Haghighian
Published by Kayfa-ta, 2018
Design by Julie Peeters

80 pages
Softcover
95 x 150 mm
ISBN 978-3-95679-453-7