Research Praxis for Food System Transformation: A Summer School
Are you a researcher focusing on Agroecology or food sovereignty? Do you work with social movements or want to in the future? Do you use participatory, transdisciplinary and activist approaches to research? Do you want to work with others to transform the food system? Are you thinking through how your research praxis fits into a theory of transformative change?
Coventry University and Uvic-UCC are organizing a summer school on Agroecology and Food Sovereignty 60 km north of Barcelona. The main objective of this summer school is to create a space to bring together activist researchers around the world who want to exchange, learn and advance their work as a “community of praxis”.
Please fill out this form by December 7 to express your interest and give your input. https://goo.gl/forms/TAf2T2guVdwaP7iB3
While there will be some material presented as provocations for discussion, the school will be primarily based on the principles of critical pedagogy, participation and popular education methodologies. Using dialogue, mutual exchange, feminist participatory methodologies, theatre, amongst other horizontal approaches, we will organize spaces for sharing ideas and research, unpacking problems in research, and to explore together the collective experiences, uncertainties, hopes and dreams of the group.
We want to take wider input into consideration as we construct the summer school. Thus, we are asking for your input, especially from those interested in participating, to share topics, approaches and ideas for the summer school. We have crafted a questionnaire for you to send us your thoughts
Some details:
- The summer school will be residential, hosted by an intentional community with basic accommodations and spaces for collective eating, cooking and learning with opportunities to engage with local Agroecology and food sovereignty initiatives.
- We plan to hold the summer school sometime in June or early July 2018 and it will likely be 6 days/5 nights in duration.
- An approximate price will be 700-1400 EUR which includes the costs of coordinating the summer school, renting space, interpretation, all meals during the residential, ground transportation for local field trips, materials and overnight accommodations for all nights. This does not include the cost of your travel to and from the site of the summer school.
- We currently have no funding for running the summer school. We are budgeting to break even. We have some ideas for funding and if successful, the costs may be lowered. We may offer bursaries if we can find funding.
- There will be Spanish-English interpretation, however unfortunately we do not have funding to cover the costs of other languages at this point.
- There is a cap of 20 participants.
- The emphasis is on PhD students, who will have priority, however we welcome inquiries from other researchers and activists.
- We hope to run this summer school yearly
- We hope that participants in the school will stay connected in the “community of praxis” via the peoples knowledge platform: peoplesknowledge.org, https://www.facebook.com/groups/peoplesknowledge/
The summer school team (Rosa Binimelis Adell, Colin Anderson, Marta Rivera-Ferre, Michel Pimbert, Chris Maughan)
Co-organised by:
The Chair Agroecology and Food Systems for Social Transformation (Uvic-UCC) http://mon.uvic.cat/catedra-agroecologia/
The Center of Agroecology, Water and Resilience (Coventry University) www.coventry.ac.uk/cawr; www.peoplesknowledge.org;
Fill out this form to express your interest: https://goo.gl/forms/TAf2T2guVdwaP7iB3