3/12 – University and Territory: Working Towards a Situated University
Thinking through concepts such as territory, community, and situated knowledge and linking them to the different missions of the Universities (with an emphasis on public Universities) is a critical task for scholars of transformative justice. In this Digital Friday, Coline Chevrin will discuss the role of these institutions, and explore how it might be collectively transformed in a way that centers place.
As grad students we tend to assume many roles within the University: we are scholars in training, fellows, instructors, and sometimes administrative employees. Many of us interrogate our practices in the academy through social transformation approaches such as abolition, decolonialism, or social and environmental justice. While we try to build communities around those practices, we also frequently face great challenges due to the structure of the University. The functioning of the very institution where we produce transformative spaces gets in the way of our struggles.
For this reason, it is important to take a step back and ask how the University can be a tool for realizing social justice in its territory? What relationships do Universities craft with the places they occupy and participate to produce and what are the limits and possibilities to the social and environmental justice these relationships engender? How can we imagine and fight for a situated University?
March 12 from 3 to 4 pm
Coline Chevrin is a 2nd year PhD Student in Geography at the Earth and Environemental Sciences Department of the Graduate Center, as well as a Futures Initiative fellow and HASTAC scholar.. Her work focuses on the links between extractivism, neo-extractivism and development strategies of Latin American cities. By looking at the manifestations of those models at different scales, she specifically studies dialectics between displacement and organized resistance, seeking for development alternatives from a decolonial perspective. After working on the Urban Agriculture Movement in Rosario, Argentina, for her Master’s Degree, Coline specialized in Urban and Global South geographies. She worked as an assistant instructor and researcher in Argentina in the Universidad Nacional de Rosario, at the Department of Political Science and International Relations. She was also part of the team in charge of creating the most recent National University in Argentina, the Universidad Nacional de Rafaela. She is very interested in Geographies of Knowledge, public universities and popular education projects.
Sponsored by the The Futures Initiative
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