Collective contribution

Dr. Mouhib Leila, Université libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles (Belgium) online

Pr. Benbelli Sara, Hassan II University of Casablanca, Casablanca (Morocco) 

Dr. Nadjat Djelloul, University of Lausanne, Lausanne (Switerzerland)

Pr. Odome Angone Ferdulis Zita, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Dakar (Senegal)

Decolonizing African-European Academic Collaborations: Cognitive Extractivism, Institutional Racism and Epistemic Justice  

This panel examines how institutional racism and Eurocentric frameworks continue to shape African–European collaborations in research and higher education, and how they can be transformed through decolonial approaches. While initiatives such as CIVIS seek to promote inclusive partnerships, structural inequalities persist in the rules governing mobility, funding, recruitment, and pedagogy. Seemingly neutral notions like academic excellence often reproduce exclusionary standards that privilege specific trajectories of life and knowledge. Each participant draws on her positionality and experience within African and European universities to expose the epistemological injustices embedded in these institutional practices. Ghaliya Djelloul (Université de Lausanne) analyzes CIVIS’s Blended Intensive Program BruLau to show how its regulations reinforce asymmetries through limited intra-European mobility, imposed recruitment formats, and narrow definitions of scientific standards, a process she conceptualizes as institutional emotional racework. Odome Angone (Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar) examines cognitive extractivism between European and African institutions and presents alternative recruitment models from Dakar’s Decolonial Doctoral School to inspire fairer CIVIS frameworks. Leila Mouhib (Université Libre de Bruxelles) revisits the colonial ghost of the mission civilisatrice that haunts alliances like CIVIS if they fail to decolonize curricula and pedagogical practices. Drawing on her teaching of international relations, she highlights Eurocentric assumptions and strategies to challenge them. Sana Benbelli (Université de Casablanca) concludes on the need for epistemological decolonization embodied through methodological practices, showing how race, nationality, and class shape access to fieldwork and research. The panel argues that genuine African–European partnerships require both resources and a radical shift in European perspectives: not extracting from Africa while pretending to educate it, but learning with and from it. By weaving experiences from North and South, the panel explores obstacles to decolonial collaboration while highlighting creative strategies already in place. ​

Individual contributions 

Dr. Mouhib Leila, Université libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles (Belgium) online

Teaching as Resistance: towards an abolitionist and decolonial praxis in university education

In this presentation, I argue that as universities in the Global North remain embedded in structures of racial capitalism, and reproduce colonial hierarchies and whiteness, any attempt to challenge these oppressive structures must be grounded in a decolonial abolitionist praxis. Moving beyond the nonperformative institutional rhetoric of diversity, this praxis is political and radical, anti-racist and decolonial, collective and relational, and directed to transformative practices and abolitionist futurities. It draws on and honors the long history of resistance to the oppressive structures of knowledge, and calls for the dismantling of oppressive academic structures, colonial curriculum and hierarchical pedagogies. Through a focus on curriculum and pedagogy, I explore how teaching can contribute to the development of pockets of resistance inside the neoliberal university and to the broader reimagining of abolitionist futures in higher education. I reflect on some experiences, including curriculum transformation, student engagement practices, and pedagogical experiments in international relations.

Pr. Benbelli Sara, Hassan II University of Casablanca, Casablanca (Morocco)

Decolonising Knowledge through Situated Pedagogies: Fieldwork, Care, and Co-Learning from the South

This contribution presents an experiment in decolonising higher education through situated pedagogies that link teaching, research, and care. Conducted within the Department of Sociology at the Université Hassan II in Casablanca, this approach emerges from collective field experiences developed both in urban and rural Morocco. These immersive pedagogical retreats invite students to co-produce research questions with local actors—women, elders, and youth—thus breaking with extractivist academic logics. The body, emotions, and collective rhythms of daily life become epistemic resources that open new ways of understanding vulnerability, solidarity, and resilience. Drawing on feminist and decolonial epistemologies, this practice challenges Eurocentric hierarchies of expertise and the assumption that knowledge flows from North to South. However, this process also reveals deeper asymmetries within global academia. Access to the field itself- its resources, infrastructures, and legitimacy - is unequally distributed. While researchers from the North circulate with relative ease between continents, many scholars and students from the South face structural barriers to mobility, funding, and recognition. These inequalities not only determine who can move and observe, but also whose knowledge counts, whose experiences are publishable, and who is authorised to “represent” the field. By cultivating reciprocity, embodied learning, and care-based relationships, these field experiences form what I call communities of learning and repair. They propose an African-centered pedagogy that resists epistemic extraction and invites European partners to rethink collaboration - not as a transfer of expertise, but as a shared, situated process of mutual transformation.

Dr. Nadjat Djelloul, University of Lausanne, Lausanne (Switerzerland)

Institutional Emotional Racework and Structural Racism in the CIVIS Alliance: Reflections from the BruLau Program

As the coordinator of a CIVIS Blended Intensive Program (BIP) in gender studies titled BruLau, I have observed how CIVIS regulations, forms, and procedures often reproduce structural racism toward African partners—both scholars and students. My contribution to this panel will therefore address the key issues at stake, from the conception to the implementation of the project, and from communication strategies to participant selection processes. It will also reflect on the modes of collaboration and teaching enabled—or limited—by the CIVIS Alliance framework. The aim of this presentation is to shed light on the institutional layers of discrimination that hinder the creation of epistemic justice within international university networks. By analyzing the structural dynamics that shape who participates, how knowledge circulates, and whose standards are legitimized, I seek to contribute to a broader reflection on what a truly global civic university alliance might look like—one that does not reproduce historical asymmetries but instead fosters mutual learning and equitable knowledge production, through the acknowledgment and critical engagement with emotional racework within institutional spaces

Pr. Odome Angone Ferdulis Zita, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Dakar (Senegal)                                    Provincializing academic knowledge: the university, a machine for depoliticizing discourse?  

From childhood, we internalize through conditioning that the frames of reference associated with the current educational system are the guarantors of knowledge with a "universal" vocation. Consequently, any epistemic contribution outside of institutional channels, on the margins of the official canon, is alternately relegated to the category of the derisory or to the periphery of the superfluous, in the name of a questionable postulate according to which any knowledge not recognized by scientific validation circuits has only apocryphal value. To this end, for more than ten years, I have been reflecting on the structural mechanisms that render invisible epistemologies seeking legitimacy, diminished within the canon. Many of us in the worlds of the "Global South," and more particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, have grown up with a diet of images, texts, signs, sounds, and meanings from elsewhere. Amidst these eclectic influences, one might wonder what happens when we tell our own stories or develop our own bodies of work, from an endogenous prism. My contribution is part of a spirit of sharing experiences on my teaching methodology forged by a transversal, inclusive, rhizomatic and inter-epistemic reading grid in a university context where the colonial legacy of the academic canon in French-speaking sub-Saharan Africa continues to marginalize endogenous knowledge by taking up the tropes of a narrative punctuated by self-flagellation. The reflection is, among other things, a summative self-assessment, in this case an intimate experience of uprooting, between the quest for (re)cognition, epistemic justice, cognitive activism and self-questioning. In light of the above, I expressly choose to present my communication, involving my subjectivity at the intersection of politics and science, aware that all knowledge is situated, even if the rhetoric of the impersonal, common in academia, imposes itself as a screen of neutrality. Keywords: Epistemic justice, endogenous knowledge, epistemidical violence, Decolonial approaches.

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Phd Student Renda Francesca, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid (Spain)                                                                       Can an art-based school change eurocentric perspective?  

In the West, starting in the 1990s, with the emergence of participatory artistic practices, people began to talk about an “educational turn”, i.e. the possibility of art acting as a bridge between experts in the field and the public, artists and participants, institutions and citizens, through the horizontal transmission of knowledge. This thesis, theorised by Irit Rogoff (2008) among others, saw enormous growth in 2010, a historical period also marked by the first large-scale mass migrations from Africa and the Middle East to Europe. Participatory educational practices thus took on a more social, activist and, in some respects, political form. María Do Mar Castro Varela noted how “in a post-colonial world, even after formal decolonisation, a feudal education system prevails” (2016). This is what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called “epistemic violence” (2016) and Anibal Quijano “el sistema modernidad/racionalidad” europeo (1991). All these theories shed light on how, after decolonisation, the main reference point and producer of knowledge is still Europe, which in this sense distances and diminishes knowledge from other non-Western countries, creating a paradigm of identification between Europe and knowledge itself. For this reason, we will analyse some case studies, the so-called “mobile academies” that have been set up in various European cities in recent years: The Silent University, by Ahmet Öğüt (2011-ongoing); Para-site School, by Felipe Castelblanco (2010-ongoing) and School of Integration by Tania Bruguera (2019). These mobile academies, which use art as a planning methodology, bring together knowledge from outside Europe through the active participation of migrant communities in the area, with a horizontal and anti-hierarchical approach. Their aim is to create micro-fractures within cultural institutions to demonstrate the gaps that exist, as well as to offer a space for sharing that is accessible to migrants, who are often marginalised by educational institutions because of their nationality.