Why did Belgian farmers take to the streets en masse last January? How do our eating habits have a major impact on the lives of farmers on the other side of the world? We tackle these questions at our annual Uni4Coop activity: ‘DJESA’, or Half-Day Exchanges on Food Sovereignty.
In collaboration with Enabel's Be global programme, Uni4coop is organising a training module for agrégation students. We are looking at issues of inequality and discrimination and how the school environment can both reproduce and combat them. We are inviting students to consider their positions as (future) teachers and their roles in shaping new generations of citizens. In the light of an education that fosters critical thinking and openness to the world and to others, tomorrow's generations will be able to work towards a fairer and more equitable world.
In February this year, Carmelle Nezerwe, an anthropologist by training with a specialisation in international humanitarian action, joined our ECMS team, alongside Fiona Nziza and Juliette Delvaux. She will be sharing her time between Louvain Coopération and AMO La Chaloupe (see opposite), in order to increase collaboration between our two organisations.
Co-constructed with a collective of students from UCLouvain, Afrika United Kap, the Afro-Récits project looks at the invisibility of racial discrimination in society and at university in particular. It aims to support Afro-descendant student collectives in building opportunities for structural change towards a more egalitarian society.
Edito
While today's new generations are rising up for climate justice #ClimateJustice, gender equality #MeToo, migratory justice #NotInMyName and anti-racism #BlackLivesMatter, the rise of nationalism in Belgium and the global North, ultraliberalism and gender discrimination continue to grow (CNCD-11.11.11). These facts fuel people's collective imagination, sow fear and reinforce stereotypes. At the same time, and within the same generation, other movements are flourishing that claim to be nationalist, and that are openly racist, homophobic and sexist. Added to this is the fact that the development model of the global North, once praised for its efficiency and high wealth production, is constantly showing its limitations through socio-ecological crises leading to inequalities and the destruction of our planet.
Higher education is no exception to this dysfunction. For example, the increase in tuition fees for foreign students (RTBF), the harassment and sexual assaults that are increasingly coming to light (UCLouvain), the whiteness of the academic body, etc. illustrate these inequalities at the structural level and at the level of epistemologies dominated by Eurocentrism, thus producing effects of blindness and ignorance.
Louvain Coopération's mission, through its Nord, Éducation à la Citoyenneté Mondiale et Solidaire and Éducation Permanente programmes, is to encourage more critical thinking about these relations of domination among the university community, the Hautes Écoles and the Écoles supérieures des arts, and particularly among students. Encouraging this critical spirit means understanding inequalities, which are often cumulative, as a set of inequalities that feed on each other and reinforce each other: "they form a system" (Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud). By social inequalities we mean inequalities of resources, gender, knowledge and power. These inequalities dominate our relations, both in the global South and in the global North, and even more so in the relations between the two. The aim of our programme is therefore to contribute to the emergence of an entire movement that examines this system of domination without essentializing it, in order to better deconstruct and reinvent itself, to propose courses of action to students and to support them in the process of change. This movement aims to be both reflexive - in contact with the academic world - and action-oriented - working together with the actors of civil society.
Fiona Nziza,
Programme Manager North
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