Long Abstract:

Learning takes place in increasingly standardised institutions world-wide, but is organised with unequally distributed resources and in increasingly fragmented publics. An awareness of post-colonial histories of epistemic practices and institutions has emerged and new forms of co-operation are tested in research and learning projects of different scales. Based on recent attempts to establish new relations ethics within and between communities of the Global North and the Global South, the joint collaboration of the universities of Leiden, Birmingham and Cologne from the EUniWell consortium and the three-partnering universities of Mohammed V de Rabat, Nairobi, and Western Cape from the African Continent, has piloted a Virtual Online International Collaborative Exchange (VOICE) involving 60 selected MA and PhD students on the topic of decentring epistemologies for global well-being. Promoting well-being is recognised as one of the key global development aspirations (SDG3). At the same time, global development schemes have been increasingly scrutinized as perpetuating forms of discrimination that need to be decolonized.

Through flash ethnographies in their surroundings and by sharing their knowledge and findings, participating students have determined strategies to re-evaluate local epistemes and diverse forms of knowing; the results of this process were published as blogs https://blog.bham.ac.uk/euniwellvoice/ . The overarching aims of this project are to foster collaborative learning processes that enable multiple perspectives on individual and social relations to an entangled past, a common present and a shared future; and to determine the demand and value of establishing a Community of Practice where EUniWell stakeholders - staff and students alike, share well-being related concerns and distinguish best practices in a structured way. The ECAS conference is a further step toward this process: by opening the discussion to a broader public, students, supervisors and teaching fellows will reflect relationally and critically on the experience of this cross-continental collaboration, its challenges, achievements and future perspectives.