Final Conference Woke and Resistance
25 June 2024
On Friday, June 7, the national final conference of the two-year project Woke and Resistance took place for which Caroline Suransky received a Comenius NRO Senior Fellowship grant. This fellowship is for educational innovations that explicitly benefit students.
Woke and Resistance started in the context of global Black Lives Matter movements and related critical questions about the knowledge-theoretical basis of (higher) education. The main objective of the project was to discover how students and staff, as agonists (critical cooperatives) can work together in curriculum development, rather than as distrustful antagonists.
Looking back, we may conclude that increasing polarization in society has only made this objective more urgent. In recent years, complex issues were raised in seminars, dialogues and workshops that were translated into educational change. At the final conference, these project experiences and interactive methods were shared with about one hundred participants from eleven higher education institutions, five non-governmental organizations and local government representatives.
After a welcome by UvH rector Joke van Saane and introduction by project leader Caroline Suransky, Prof. Gloria Wekker gave a keynote lecture in which she discussed her experiences as a student of color and later as professor. As a "space invader," she analyzed racism in the Netherlands about which she wrote her well-known book White Innocence. In a fascinating talk, she emphasized, among other things, the importance of intersectionality in education and research. This was followed by a panel, led by Noortje Bot, talked about experiences and outcomes in each of the four project phases: Putting Educational Change on the Agenda; Practicing Educational Change; Exploring and Designing Educational Change and finally Evaluating and Sharing Educational Change.
Various methods were discussed, such as "Dialogue-in-the-canteen" in which we had frank discussions in groups based on case studies; interactions with the American visiting professor Prof. Anthony Pinn following his Socrates lecture which we co-hosted with the Humanist League, educational development workshops led by external experts on diversity and inclusion and on decolonization for staff and student assistants; an international online dialogue on decolonizing higher education with students from Stellenbosch University in South Africa, and finally the role of Wokeness and Resistance in dialogues with the University Executive Board (CvB), students and staff about Gaza/Palestine.
Then, participants could experience these working methods for themselves by participating in one of four interactive elective workshops in the afternoon program: Emotion Networks (facilitated by UvH alumnus Rosa Mul in collaboration with the Reinwardt Academy), Socratic and Agonistic Conversation, Caleidoscopia - Playing with Diversity or by engaging online 'live' with South African students.
The conference was brought to a close by Caroline Suransky, who addressed concrete outcomes of the project, but also reflected on the hard, and often invisible, work that changing an organization culture requires.
The Woke and Resistance team is currently in the process of finalizing an online tool kit that will be available in Dutch through the University of Humanistic Studies website, from Friday, July 5, 2024. An English translation will follow asap. The tool kit includes many of the working forms discussed above and can be downloaded for free as an 'open access resource' and used as a source of inspiration at the UvH and elsewhere.
Caroline Suransky (project leader), on behalf of student members Farach Winter, Leen Kruithof, Marishelle Lieberwerth, Brechje Meijer, Rebecca Lensink, Rosanne van Bruggen and lecturer Noortje Bot.
On Friday, June 7, the National final conference of the two-year project Wokeness and Resistance took place for which Caroline Suransky received a Comenius NRO Senior Fellowship grant. This fellowship is for educational innovations that explicitly benefit students.