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For young people to bring about real change
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