MaCTRI Summer School hosts International Decolonial Exchange Project Summer School Programme
Programme: International Decolonial Exchange Project in partnership with two Brazilian Universities.
When is the programme taking place: September 27th, 12-6pm
Location: Luther King House, Manchester (https://maps.app.goo.gl/BzuiUiZ2wtMcjGw57) and also online (Zoom video conferencing).
MaCTRI is hosting the UK arm of the Abdias Nascimento Academic Development Program which is a collaborative project between the Federal University of the Amazon, Federal University of the Mato Grosso and MEaP Academy Community Training & Research Institute (MaCTRI)/Manchester/United Kingdom.
Objectives of the Programme
In this first stage of the collaboration between institutions the objectives are:
- For Brazilian PhD and Masters students to visit the UK to conduct research on UK policies around access to Higher Education and the resilience strategies Black and Indigenous students in Brazil.can continue to develop by using UK scholarly and community networks as inspiration
- To develop multifocal exchange experiences by offering joint courses in a hybrid format that enable the exchange of experiences between the Brazilian Graduate students involved and the Scholars at MaCTRI and their extended community networks in Manchester, Luton and London. This will contribute to Master’s and doctoral development of a decolonial praxis that considers Black and Indigenous epistemologies and their ancestral heritages. This will dovetail with MaCTRI’s decolonial doctoral publishing programme.
- To support the internationalisation and strengthening of the Brazilian Graduate Programs involved in the project by awarding scholarships, conducting missions, mobility, international cooperation between research groups, and exchange experiences that will contribute to the theoretical and methodological improvement of research, intellectual production and the inclusion of Black and Indigenous Amazonian students.
Overall goal of the programme
The overall goal of this leg of the programme is to use UK grassroots decolonial praxis as an inspiration for the Brazilian development of methods and strategies that combat epistemic racism generated by curricula frameworks and research practices that fail to incorporate Black, Indigenous, Latin American critical knowledge into their foundations.
We intend that the second leg of the project will be an opportunity for MaCTRI’s Scholars and community partners to visit communities in the Mato Grosso and Amazonian regions to gain an insight into their grassroots decolonial practices.
Programme origins
The program began in 2024, with an institutional visit to England. In 2025, eight Brazilian students (Master’s and doctoral) be participated in exchange activities in the United Kingdom through this partnership.
Programme Report
The Summer school event was an opportunity for the Brazilian students to share their learning from their UK community experiences and to begin a dialogue with the MaCTRI Scholars and their community partners about a shared vision of decolonial praxis. The event was a hybrid of online and face to face participation. We had 15 contributors from Federal Universities of the Amazon, Mato Grosso and Scholars from MaCTRI.
The themes from the day explored included the experiences of Black students in Brazil and the UK, especially discussing the structural barriers for Afro-Brazilian participation in Higher Education and the Criminal Justice System. Contributors discussed research that looked at the Afro Brazilian experience as well as the wider experience of the structures of Brazilian Higher Education and Criminal Justice. This theme was also carried into an intersectional space where neurodiversity was also discussed in terms of equity of access. Brazilian participants had already met UK grassroots community groups to discuss and “compare notes” of their experiences of these intersectional issues centering race and neurodiversity, so were able to link this to the development of a deeper community co-produced decolonial praxis.
Using the concept of Quilombismo, developed by Adias Nascimentio (a celebrated Brazilian Civil Rights Activist) whom we were introduced to in our opening presentation, contributors shared their research into strategies that mitigated lack of equitable access. MaCTRI scholars shared their research into the application of indigenous/inter-generational knowledge co-production through emotional, spiritual and cultural intelligence which matched the earlier Brazilian theoretical application of cultural and symbolic capital.
Participants also discussed environmental and cultural heritage leadership via a Black Feminist lens that could be used to define a grassroots decolonial praxis.
The event ended with an introduction to a form of group work (Afro-centric systemic constellations practice) created to integrate indigenous knowledge/memory to a contemporaneous consciousness via “knowing fields”, in turn, designed to facilitate the co-production of solutions to community challenges. The workshop was an introduction to the new volume Ancient African Futures: Systemic Constellations Practice a Decolonial Poetics that is the latest contribution to the Palgrave Studies in Decolonisation and Grassroots Black Organic Intellectualism. This workshop by centering ancestral wisdom and knowledge co-production also mirrored the opening workshop of making traditional Brazilian rag dolls of the orixas (gods), strongly evoking candomble spirituality.
The conversations between the themes brought out in the plenary were very much a continuation of the conversations started in the Palgrave Macmillan volume, Decoloniality in the Grassroots: The Re-emergence of the Black Organic Intellectual (Clennon & Sampaio, 2023)
We will be putting together an edited volume of this event as an opportunity for contributors to continue their rich intercultural exchanges. The edited volume will be co-edited by Prof Iolete Da Silva, Prof Claudia Sampaio and Dr Ornette D Clennon and will form part of the Palgrave Studies in Decolonisation and Grassroots Black Organic Intellectualism
