Decolonial Collective Learning Workshop “Glances from the South”
On Friday 9 and Saturday 10 May 2025, the Decolonial Collective Learning Workshop “Glances from the South” was held at Villa Angaran San Giuseppe in Bassano del Grappa (Vi). From the Mediterranean and, even further south, from the Sahel, other visions come to Europe, to Italy, deeply destabilising compared to established stereotypes and sometimes even unconscious. The Workshop has brought together three different nuclei, three approaches, three (and more) practices of relations with/on the South: the CNCA (https://www.cnca.it/il-cnca/) and the Pictor Network (https://retepictor.org/), and thus reflective realities, with a critical approach, of/on the social sphere in Italy; the NGOs ACRA (https://www.acra.it/acra#chi-siamo) and CRIC (https://www.cric.it/chi-siamo/), operating in the Sahel, one with headquarters in Milan, the other in Reggio Calabria; the research group of the PRIN SECA, composed of the units of the University of Padua and Milan. Social cooperation in Italy, non-governmental cooperation in the Sahel and social research in the Sahel have thus come together in this experiment. The underlying thesis of the Workshop is that we must learn from the Souths, that their gaze is not only important but also changes us, transforms us. The decolonial reversal of the way the world is represented and interpreted is a breath of hope to get out of the sad and self-centred shoals of “fortress Europe”. The “crisis” is first and foremost our own, Western: of the world in metamorphosis (Beck) we have no maps, but fragments of the “landscapes of tomorrow” can perhaps be found in the South. Here then are the questions around which we have worked: what happens in the South, that is, how do societies, Sahelian in particular, try to react to the polycrisis in which they are immersed? What reflections and practices speak to ours, of crisis? What does it mean to cooperate in different societies in crisis? How do we rethink cooperation in practice: in the formulation and evaluation of projects, in relations between North/South staff, in the role to be given to local knowledge? And what does it mean to do cooperation together, what new forms can it take? How do the Souths enter the Norths, disturb them, highlight their fractures? How does looking from the South change the way of doing projects and research? Each from his or her own point of view, the participants contributed to a collective learning, which will then find several possible outcomes. The first planned is a volume, written together, in which the reflections initiated in the Workshop will be brought together and which will subsequently be fine-tuned: a book intended for a multiple audience, researchers and university students, CNCA operators and mediators, ACRA and CRIC (and other) cooperators.
Here are some links that talk about the experience:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJjDy9aszJJ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJjE2SOsUpy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link