“Engage! … and things will be fine.”
The language of engagement and engaged practices is gaining traction in times of intersecting crises. Arts and the humanities are interpellated as the last resort where other disciplines and approaches have failed. The call to art and the humanities goes hand in hand with the impetus to innovate, create, and deviate from the day-to-day conduct of politics and governance. The promise and hope conferred to engagement often obscures its actual terms and after-life. Engaging art and the humanities as remedy for social, environmental or political disarray in this way turns them into a quasi-magical weapon against inevitable demise.
This lecture series inquires the troubles of engagement in radical pedagogies inside and outside academia. It asks what it means to learn and unlearn habits of making and thinking in times of crises. Engagement is a janus-headed concept: on the one hand institutions promote it as a solution proposing “adapted” or “flexible” pedagogies, on the other hand it concerns forms of care, concern, and involvement that exceeds solutionism. Engagement, in this sense, is both a burden and a necessity—a site of experiment, relation, and practice.
The series convenes six conversational pairings of practitioners doing radical pedagogies inside and outside academic institutions. Together, these conversations aim to open up what can be done with the call for engagement: how to resist the solutionist framework of white governance, and how to build alliances between communities of practitioners of radical pedagogies in a minor key.
The lecture series are co-organised by Christoph Brunner and Claire Tio on behalf of ESPhil and RASL
14 nov 2025 | PARAPEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session, Erin Manning and Fumi Okiji inquire into the problem of higher education’s schemes of streamlined education and the calls for innovative and impact-driven research. It will engage with these perspectives through the intersection of neurodiversity and Black studies. They introduce the term ‘parapedagogies’ to problematize the divide between the classroom and its outside, asking how learning and unlearning require care for relationality and differentiation.
Fumi Okiji is Associate Professor of Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley. She arrived at the academy by way of the London jazz scene and draws on sound practices to inform her writing. Okiji works across black study, critical theory, and sound and music studies. Her most recently published book is Billie’s Bent Elbow: Exorbitance, Intimacy and a Nonsensuous Standard (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Erin Manning is professor of fine arts and philosophy at Concordia University. Recent books include The Being of Relation (Intellect), Unsettled (forthcoming, minor compositions), Out of the Clear (2022, minor compositions), and For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020). She works in the transversality of the three ecologies - the environmental, the conceptual and the social - with an emphasis on the aesthetico-political (3ecologies.org). Her artistic practices compose with movement, relation and emergent collectivity, always in conversation with neurodiversity - a recent exhibition is entitled 100 Acres (Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, 2024).
If the link below doesn´t work, please use this link.
12 dec 2025 | RHYTHMIC PEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Josephine Zwaan and Vernon Chatlein draw on a history of pedagogical practices related to rhythm and music. As musicians, community organizers, scholars, and teachers, they explore rhythm as a pedagogical necessity. Problematizing linear forms of education, they seek out a polyphonic approach that challenges classic forms of attention and engagement. The session includes live musical elements.
Vernon Chatlein is a percussionist and composer from Curaçao, specializing in Afro-Caribbean, Latin music, and jazz. He is also the creative producer of his own research and performance platform, Voices from Letters. In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Gieskes-Strijbis Podium Prize and in 2025 the Black Achievement Award.
Chatlein is currently working on a trilogy titled Tula.Verse, which explores the history of slave revolts in the Caribbean and South America, with Tula, the leader of the largest slave rebellion in Curaçao, serving as the central figure. This retelling of Curaçao’s history of resistance is brought to life through music, spoken word, theater, and visual art. It is created in collaboration with the Royal Theater in The Hague and provides a retro-afrofuturistic perspective on the transatlantic slave trade
Josephine Zwaan is an artist, music producer and PhD candidate exploring music production practices and technologies through a decolonial lens. She is co-founder of rosetta., the first platform for female and nonbinary music producers in the Netherlands. Josephine initially started her career as a singer-songwriter, and later transformed into her dark rap alter-ego SUZOOKI SWIFT. Currently, Josephine is doing a PhD at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, where she focuses on reframing aesthetics, process and meaning in electronic music production through the lens of African philosophies.
6 Feb 2026 | SUSTAINABLE PEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Sophie van Balen and Lisa Doeland reflect on sustainable pedagogy as ecological, sensorial and temporal practice: how to relate to the environment in a respectful and sensitive manner, but also how to sustain ‘engagement’ beyond the timeframe of a ‘project’ or ‘intervention’. This conversation explores the imperceptible yet life-sustaining role of air and waste as constant yet subtle forms of engaging and relating. The conversation addresses how to problematize non-engaged sciences in a major key, meaning dis-engaged reflection and practical inertness.
Sophie van Balen is PhD candidate in environmental philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy in Rotterdam. Her research project, funded by NWO, concerns a feminist and decolonial rethinking of the ‘catastrophic atmospheric troubles’ of climate change and air pollution through breath. She recently published ‘Breathable Futures' and co-authored 'Composing climate change as a matter of everyday living’. Sophie is also chair of the PhD Council at the Dutch Research School of Philosophy (OZSW) and chair of the board at Stichting Maand van de Filosofie.
Lisa Doeland is a philosopher, writer and teacher. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit on a project concerning the existential dimensions of planetary health. Her research interests are extinction, apocalyptic thought, ecological catastrophe, waste and hauntology. In her PhD she explored the myriad and uncanny ways in which we are haunted by waste. How does the spectre of waste force us to rethink dreams about recycling without remainders within a circular economy? Apocalypsofie (2023, Dutch) is her most recent book.
UPDATE: Due to the illness of one of the speakers, the session of the online lecture series Radical Pedagogies and the Troubles of Engagement originally scheduled for March 13 was postponed.
We are pleased to inform you that a new date has been confirmed: June 5 (see the event listed at the bottom of the page for details).
We apologize for any inconvenience caused and appreciate your understanding. Thank you for your interest in the series, and we hope you will be able to join us on the rescheduled date.
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Flavia Meireles and Rosalba Icaza Garza open a conversation across Latin America and Europe on how to engage in practices of decolonization in education without losing the particularities of the territories where these practices take place. They address both the fatigue and the desire to disengage from the extractivist logic of the neoliberal university, and highlight possible modes of resistance and support.
Rosalba Icaza is Full Professor of International Relations, and Scientific Director of the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. She currently serves as member of the Advisory Academic Board of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and the International Advisory Board of the NWO-funded project Race and Equality in Dutch Academia. She is a decolonial feminist scholar-activist, mentor, and teacher with over 20 years of experience across Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Australia. Prior to Leiden, Rosalba worked for 17 years at the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam where I was Professor of Global Politics, Feminisms and Decoloniality and Vice-Dean of Research. Her work focuses on the geopolitics of knowledge production, eco-epistemic justice, and the decolonization of higher education. In essence, she asks: What counts as knowledge? Whose knowledge is rendered non-existent, and why? And what can universities and societies do to overcome the geopolitical, geohistorical, eco-epistemic inequalities in knowledge production? In addressing these questions, she intersects the fields of global politics, feminisms, and decoloniality.
Flavia Meireles is Arts Professor and professor at the Graduate Program of Ethnical-racial Relations (PPRER) at CEFET-RJ (Brazil). Fellow/Post-doc at Mecila Centre (University of Cologne, State University of São Paulo) in 2023. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She was a visiting researcher at Center for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (CTSG) of the University of Brighton (UK, 2022), and Visiting Researcher of the Angewandte Theaterwissenchaft (ATW) at Justus-Liebeg Universität (Giessen) with a scholarship from CAPES – Brasil (2018-2019) . Her doctoral thesis received honourable mention at the ABEH Prize 2021 for thesis and dissertations, from the Brazilian Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies (ABEH). Her main interests are grassroots social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially indigenous movements and the plurality of feminists LGBTQIA struggles and discourses; politics of body; contemporary work; decolonial feminism from Global South perspectives; dance, cinema, visual arts and intersected politics of race, gender and sexuality.
24 April 2026 | MEDIATED PEDAGOGIES
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Sofia Boschat-Thorez and Maxime Hackermann examine learning as a mediated practice shaped by techniques a technologies of communication, sensation, and collaboration. In this sense, media and technologies ask for an expanded scope of pedagogical practice that is always more-than-human. They propose a radical disengagement from the logics of platform capitalism and its educational tools, exposing the entrapments of contemporary institutions and imagining tactics of media-technological resistance.
Sofia Boschat Thorez is a researcher, educator and cultural worker whose focus is on digital infrastructures and knowledge organisation systems. Her interests lay in finding modes of collective learning and organising, outside of digital extractivism, alongside strategies to divest from infrastructural oppression. She is a member of Varia, a Rotterdam-based initiative which aims at developing critical understandings of the technologies that surround us. She teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy and at the ESA Saint Luc in Brussels.
Maxime Hackermann is an activist artist and teacher based in Brussels, deeply involved in the intersection of art, technology and social criticism. As a faculty member at the ERG (École de recherche graphique), he contributed to the school's critical approach to digital tools and infrastructure.
He is notably recognized for his pivotal role in the "Byebye Google" project, a multi-year initiative that successfully migrated the school's entire digital infrastructure away from Google services (Gmail, Drive, etc.) to independent, self-hosted and free software alternatives, maintained by Tactic asbl. This project stands as a concrete example of institutional digital emancipation and data sovereignty in the artistic education sector.
22 May 2026 | COMMONING PEDAGOGIES
This is an in-person event, 17:00 - 18:30, Buitenplaats Brienenoord (Van Brienenoord 5, 3077 AE Rotterdam)
In this final conversation of the lecture series, James Parnell and Lionel Deul delve into the joys and challenges of community-building and collective learning. This session problematizes notions of community as a homogeneous, harmonious entity that is given and ‘out there.’ As organisers and dancers within queer communities and the ballroom scene, James and Lionel bring their experience of creating spaces for every-body: spaces in which people come together not in spite of, but through their differences. Together, we will reflect on questions of ownership, power and conflict, and how the constant renegotiation of such questions dynamizes communities and our collective learning practices.
5 June 2026 | DECOLONIAL PEDAGOGIES | New Date
All sessions take place online* 17:00-18:30 CET
In this session Flavia Meireles and Rosalba Icaza Garza open a conversation across Latin America and Europe on how to engage in practices of decolonization in education without losing the particularities of the territories where these practices take place. They address both the fatigue and the desire to disengage from the extractivist logic of the neoliberal university, and highlight possible modes of resistance and support.
Rosalba Icaza is Full Professor of International Relations, and Scientific Director of the Institute of Political Science at Leiden University. She currently serves as member of the Advisory Academic Board of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and the International Advisory Board of the NWO-funded project Race and Equality in Dutch Academia. She is a decolonial feminist scholar-activist, mentor, and teacher with over 20 years of experience across Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Australia. Prior to Leiden, Rosalba worked for 17 years at the Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam where I was Professor of Global Politics, Feminisms and Decoloniality and Vice-Dean of Research. Her work focuses on the geopolitics of knowledge production, eco-epistemic justice, and the decolonization of higher education. In essence, she asks: What counts as knowledge? Whose knowledge is rendered non-existent, and why? And what can universities and societies do to overcome the geopolitical, geohistorical, eco-epistemic inequalities in knowledge production? In addressing these questions, she intersects the fields of global politics, feminisms, and decoloniality.
Flavia Meireles is Arts Professor and professor at the Graduate Program of Ethnical-racial Relations (PPRER) at CEFET-RJ (Brazil). Fellow/Post-doc at Mecila Centre (University of Cologne, State University of São Paulo) in 2023. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She was a visiting researcher at Center for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (CTSG) of the University of Brighton (UK, 2022), and Visiting Researcher of the Angewandte Theaterwissenchaft (ATW) at Justus-Liebeg Universität (Giessen) with a scholarship from CAPES – Brasil (2018-2019) . Her doctoral thesis received honourable mention at the ABEH Prize 2021 for thesis and dissertations, from the Brazilian Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies (ABEH). Her main interests are grassroots social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially indigenous movements and the plurality of feminists LGBTQIA struggles and discourses; politics of body; contemporary work; decolonial feminism from Global South perspectives; dance, cinema, visual arts and intersected politics of race, gender and sexuality.