International Meeting

Volos

November 11-13, 2025

Erasmus + Mobility Program

University of Thessaly & University of Cape Town

From the 11th till the 13th of November 2025, a number of international meetings are co-organized by the University of Thessaly and the University of Cape Town. The aim is to explore questions of decolonising our practices in relation to epistemic, ontological, linguistic, spatial, social, and ecological justice.

The work is interdisciplinary: it draws theoretically from the social sciences and the sciences to explore reparative strategies for making our common worlds by drawing on plural ways of knowing, living and making, including disciplinary cultures in, for example, mathematics, architecture, design, engineering, the built environment, languages, and the arts. And it coheres around both critical posthuman, new materialist and epistemologies of the South thinking. Specifically, we explore how the curriculum and its enactment in pedagogic and didactic relations can harness historical and contemporary objects that help us re-story our spaces, re-pair our relations and re-think our practices towards more just conditions of living and making between peoples and between peoples and the Earth.

Hosted across various spaces of the University of Thessaly, these events include a series of public interdepartmental meetings with guest lectures, a student workshop, and joint classes that explore the onto-epistemological potentials and the limits of the ‘South’ as a perspective and method across disciplines. These exchanges seek to foster dialogue that engages with the rich body of theoretical production concerning disciplinary areas from below, situated within the diverse historical and geopolitical contexts of the South (of) Africa and the South of Europe. In doing so, they explore novel possibilities for producing knowledge challenging North–South binaries and their effects on disciplinary, cultural, scientific, linguistic, bodily, epistemic and ontic boundaries.

Collaborating institutions:

University of Cape Town (UCT)

Language Development Group, Academic Development Program

Department of Civil Engineering

University of Thessaly (UTH)

Department of Early Childhood Education

Department of Architecture

Department of Language and Intercultural Studies

Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries

Scientific & Organizing team (alphabetically):

Anna Chronaki / UTH, Early Childhood Education

Roula Kitsiou / UTH, Language and Intercultural Studies

Iris Lykourioti / UTH, Department of Architecture

Siddique Motala / UCT, Department of Civil Engineering

Dana Papachristou / UTH, Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries

Petros Phokaides / UTH, Department of Architecture

Kate le Roux / UCT, LDG, Academic Development Program