Archives: Events

By Dr. Cassandra Ellerbe

Berlin University of Technology + SUSI Interkulturelles Frauenzentrum – Berlin

 

Open call for participants (students, PhD, Postdoc)

Please apply by e-mail with a brief motivation as places are limited (max. 15 participants): chia.longman@ugent.be

 

Empowerment tools and strategies for marginalized students should center relational resilience, ecological entanglement, and systemic awareness.

But what does this mean in practice?

In this interactive and participatory workshop, we will explore this question together through reflection, dialogue, and experiential exercises.

Drawing on insights from Embodied Social Justice as well as Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (2021); we will examine key approaches to empowerment that move beyond an exclusively individual understanding of resilience.

Together, we will explore how resilience can be understood as a relational and collective practice, how our well-being is connected to wider social and ecological systems, and how greater systemic awareness can support marginalized students in navigating and responding to structural inequalities.

Key words: Relational resilience & empowerment

The CRCG is co-organising with the Human Rights Research Network a lecture and panel talk with prof. Heidi Morrison (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse).

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe,” James Baldwin wrote in 1980.

 

Yet around the world, children’s lives continue to be shaped by the enduring legacies of colonialism—from violence, displacement, and forced separation to detention and the denial of basic rights. But children are not only victims of these systems. They are also agents of survival, resilience, and resistance.

 

This evening begins with a lecture by Professor Heidi Morrison (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse), who will explore nearly a century of Zionist settler-colonial violence against Palestinian children, culminating in the ongoing genocide in Gaza that has targeted more than 21.000 children by now.

 

Drawing on her recently published book, Lived Resistance Against the War on Palestinian Children, Morrison asks a vital question on the third anniversary of the start of the Gaza genocide: rather than asking whether Palestinian children resist, what can we learn by asking how they resist? Without romanticizing children’s resistance, her talk considers what Palestinian young people reveal about our shared humanity—and why that humanity is worth fighting for.

 

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion bringing together scholars and advocates working on Palestinian children’s rights, transnational adoption, the history of the Belgian Métis, and child detention. Together, we will examine how colonial ideas about childhood continue to shape injustice—and how children and communities confront, challenge, and resist these erasures.

 

You can find more information about the public event and registration here:

https://hrrn.ugent.be/event/human-rights-de-krook-the-children-are-always-ours-resisting-colonial-oppression-of-childhood/

This presentation explores the challenges, implications and potential for change of unpaid care work performed by staff and students of European universities. Unpaid care is a gendered, structural yet largely invisible condition shaping participation, learning quality and academic work. It includes, among others, caring for children, elderly parents or relatives with (mental) health conditions or disabilities. While exploratory in nature, this study offers valuable insights into both the policies and practices surrounding care and the predominant values and understandings of academic work and study and the conceptions of staff and students as care-free individuals.

Please confirm your participation by registering using this link

 

You are invited to join our upcoming GRACE-ETN webinar on June 11 at 15:00Grief in Academia.

This session will focus on Grief in Academia and will be given by Dr. Maria Esther Fernández Mostaza from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

This talk explores the often-overlooked presence of grief in academia. Drawing on the CARE – Care in Academia project, it examines how universities’ focus on productivity and constant performance leaves little room to acknowledge vulnerability and disenfranchised grief among students and staff. The session considers how unaddressed grief affects wellbeing, participation, and equity, and invites reflection on how academic institutions might better integrate care and compassion.

Webinar Details
📅 Date: 11 June
🕒 Time: 15:00 – 16:00
📍 Location: Online

We would be excited to have you join us. Please confirm your participation by registering using the link*. After signing up you will receive a Google Meet link to participate.

*https://forms.gle/JThvExctg5kDRUJw5

 

Self-care and spiritual wellbeing practices are increasingly shaped by neoliberal ideals of productivity. Yet when enacted as forms of radical self-love and self-recovery, they can also operate as sites of resistance. The webinar explores this tension through an ethnographic study of womb yoga, a women-centred alternative therapy developed in the UK.

Prof. Carine Plancke is Guest Professor in Gender and Diversity Studies and directs the Centre for Research on Culture & Gender at Ghent University. She holds a MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology (KU Leuven), a postgraduate in Women’s Studies (University of Antwerp.) and a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris / KU Leuven.) She worked as a teaching and research fellow at the universities of Nice and Clermont-Ferrand, as a Fernand Braudel and a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Roehampton and as a FWO postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University. Her research areas are anthropology, gender, body practices, dance, performance, yoga, tantra, affect, ritual and creativity, contemporary spirituality, Central Africa, Western Europe.

This webinar is the first in 2026 webinar series “Care in Academia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective” , organized by the GRACE-ETN: Globalization, Religion and Culture Educational Thematic Network.

Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScTejWlkpgpOcSrN11mFChTV5erQPlbT4BU6nzm_psK75E8HQ/viewform 

During this lunch seminar, Lamia Kocaman will present her research on transnational home-making between Europe and Turkey, focusing on amplifying women’s voices. Her work examines how migrant women actively shape their multiple homes across borders and negotiate multiple belongings. By analyzing both the processes and products of home-making, Kocaman explores how transnational houses challenge traditional, static notions of the home. These houses are both fixed in place and shaped by their connections elsewhere. Using a transnational framework, her research highlights the circulation of spatial knowledge, practices, and aesthetics between European cities (cities of residence Ghent and Stockholm) and Turkish towns (cities of origin: Emirdağ and Kulu). Through in-depth interviews and spatial mapping, Kocaman amplifies the voices of women who often remain underrepresented in architectural and urban studies. Her work intersects architecture, anthropology, and feminism, offering new insights into how migration impacts domestic spaces across borders and landscapes.

Lamia Kocaman is a PhD student in the Department of History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture at KU Leuven. She is currently working on a dissertation titled Transnational Housing: A Spatial Analysis of the Processes and Products of Migrant Women’s Home-Making Between Europe and Turkey (supervised by Luce Beeckmans).