Seminar information
Time: Wednesday, 19.11.2025, 13:00-14:00 (UTC +2 / Helsinki time)
Place: Room 247 (2nd floor), Unioninkatu 33 (inner courtyard), you can also
This event is organized by EuroStorie in collaboration with
Epistemic redistributions in the Global South Classroom
Soukaina Chakkour (Al Akhawayn University, Morocco)
in conversation with Kolar Aparna (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Abstract
This conversation aims to explore the dynamics of the global south classroom beyond extractive logics and rationality of the traditional academy, which often treats Global South as a passive object of knowledge, and a passive recipient of knowledge. Educators from/in the Global South engage in the double labor of teaching Western-centric frames of knowledge while simultaneously creating space for local and counter epistemologies. This talk engages in a conversation about Global South pedagogies from a location-based and positionality-based approach. It aims at reconceptualizing the Global South/Postcolonial classroom as a deliberate and intentional space for creating accountability and highlights especially how epistemic agency is actively redistributed within the Global South classroom. We revisit the question, “When in the world is your classroom?” posed by the speakers during the International Summit on Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Global South at the School of Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities Al Akhawayn University, Morocco in 2024, alongside the questions of Where, Who, Why, What of the Global South Classroom addressed during the Summit.
Short Biographies
Soukaina Chakkour is a lecturer at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco where she teaches on the Politics and Poetics of the Global South. She works on issues of migration, postcolonial politics and migrant temporalities. Soukaina was previously a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and she recently completed her PhD at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands in Cultural Anthropology with a dissertation entitled: "Living the postcolony: Egyptian Be(longings) in Paris". She is currently based in Morocco where she engages with developing critical Global South pedagogies.
Kolar Aparna is a researcher at University of Helsinki, Finland. Her works have contributed to pedagogical modalities and debates in postcolonial studies and decolonizing the University across cultural and academic spaces in EU for more than a decade. As a diasporic artist and academic from South India, she has enabled and participated in students and staff of colour movements for epistemic plurality in European universities the last decades, contributing to produce situated knowledges across margins and peripheries, and from Global South as a relation (not a geopolitical region) of moving subalternized positionalities.