About this Event
This course is offered by the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education and certified by CIFAL Victoria, a Hub of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) located at UVic. It presents an opportunity for in depth-understanding on Knowledge Democracy from the leading international voices in the field.
The course will be an interactive learning experience led by a group of exceptional leaders in the field of knowledge democracy, epistemic justice and the decolonization of knowledge. It will introduce concepts of knowledge inequities, Indigenous legal approaches, ‘boundary-spanning’ in the co-construction of research, transformative knowledge and climate resilience, and open science. The course will invite participants to image and contribute to a new architecture of knowledge – one where academic knowledge, Indigenous knowledges, situated knowledges and other ways of knowing are equally recognized, valued, brought into conversation and woven together to address the critical challenges of our times.
Our speakers include:
Leslie Chan is Associate Professor in the Department of Development Studies and Director of the Knowledge Equity Lab at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. He is a leading international scholar in knowledge equity, infrastructures of open science and research led open access in the global South.
Rajesh Tandon, Co-Chair, UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education and Founder President of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA). Rajesh is a leading global voice in issues of knowledge, sustainability and justice.
Budd Hall, Co-Chair, UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education. Budd has 60 years working on issues of participatory research, learning and action. He is associated with the Centre for Global Studies.
Walter Lepore, with extensive experience in Mexico and Canada, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration and Director of Research for the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research. He currently leads the SSHRC funded international study looking at the role of ‘boundary-spanners’, those persons who serve as the points of contact between universities and communities in the co-construction of Research.
Andrew Ambers is from the ‘Namgis and Ma’amtagila First Nations of the Kwakwaka’wakw Peoples. He is currently completing the Juris Doctor (JD) / Juris Indigenarum Doctor (JID) program at the University of Victoria, Faculty of Law. At the Borders in Globalization Research Lab, Ambers is the Indigenous Internationalism Research Fellow, where he researches Indigenous legal orders, international law, and the incorporation of international law into domestic Canadian law.
Abdul Tawab Balakarzai recently completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Victoria, where his research explored the institutional evolution, marginalization, nature-based solutions, and social-ecological resilience of traditional groundwater governance (karez systems) in arid regions. A civil engineer by training, having previously served as the Acting Minister of Higher Education and Deputy Minister for Academic Affairs in Afghanistan, his current research is at the intersection of nature-based solutions and traditional water governance advocates integrating traditional, land-based knowledge into contemporary water governance and environmental peacebuilding.
Olívia Almeida manages the DECODE Knowledge Project at the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and is a PhD candidate in the School of Public Administration at UVic. Olívia's work advances community-based and participatory research practices across cultures and territories, and her research focuses on embodied water epistemologies and third sector water governance programming.
Event venue & nearby stays
UVic Faculty of Law, Fraser Building, Victoria, Canada
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.