Horizontal Learning: Where Activists and Academics Meet

TuTela Learning Network is an informal, open and feminist international collective aimed at building connections among marginalised activists’ experiences in education and community. Here, TuTela members Kitti Baracsi, Marta Ruffa and Dresda Emma Méndez de la Brena share insights about creating spaces of collective and creative learning, looking for the intersections of activist and academic knowledge, and inspiring diverse forms of knowledge production. Their experiences of designing collective learning processes will, they hope, inspire others in their efforts to decolonise higher education.

Knowledge production is an intersectional issue. We believe that universities can and should learn from the experience of activists, especially those from marginalised communities and silenced groups. This is why, in contexts of institutionalised knowledge production, including universities, TuTela Learning Network’s mission is to look for the intersections of activist and academic knowledge, while at the same time we aim to inspire divergent forms of knowledge production that break the boundaries.

TuTela Learning Network is an informal, open and feminist international collective aimed at building connections among marginalised activists’ experiences in education and community work. Our network’s members are activists and critical educators with long years of experience with grassroots initiatives, and we work on creating spaces of mutual learning for activists. We strongly believe that an initiative by Roma women in a Hungarian city’s periphery can inspire and be inspired by activists in a Brazilian favela, and we wish to counter the mainstream dynamics of how “best practices” are legitimised and disseminated.

With this goal in mind, we collect first-hand testimonies from activists and make them available in different languages to boost online and offline spaces of inspiration and mutual learning. The members and collaborators of our network are activists involved in education and community work in different countries. We organise face-to-face workshops among activists and online encounters for professionals who are keen on learning from the recorded activist testimonies.

In our opinion, there is an infinite number of aspects that can enrich and reform academic knowledge, based on what activists around the globe can teach us. These aspects include feminist and collaborative research methodologies, feminist organising, and feminist practices of exposing and deconstructing the power dynamics that persist in so many areas of society. University staff and students can learn from activists’ testimonies to gain the tools they need to work toward equity, not only in the contents of their research but in all aspects of their work. The same applies to NGOs. We support these processes by facilitating collective learning spaces, including training and workshops and the collective systematisation of experiences.

Furthermore, we encourage others to discover and share experiences of community initiatives from their own contexts where they live and work. Through workshops and other activities, we provide a space for collective critical thinking, building knowledge based on practical experiences, mutual listening and sharing.

One of our workshops was held as part of a course on minority identities at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Pécs in Hungary. After we shared basic principles of feminist and collaborative research, the students conducted video interviews with people belonging to minority groups (including ethnic identity, sexual orientation or disability) who could talk about their life experiences. These videos are now part of our growing database of multimedia material that is used in workshops, and, in the longer term, will be collected on a digital platform.

Last year we also held a workshop at the University of Granada with students of social work. The workshop’s objective was to build connections between marginalised activists’ experiences, and social and community work. We brought three testimonies from different parts of the world, all connected to gender-based violence, the subject of the course. Future social workers who might go on to work on gender-based violence in marginalised communities had the opportunity to engage with the experiences of activists from a Rio de Janeiro favela and from a Roma community in Hungary, and to hear the first-hand testimony of an activist-scholar about being a survivor of violence and her efforts to raise awareness about the issue. These experiences, combined with theoretical concepts, offer a better understanding of the underlying dynamics and possibilities of intervention.

We believe in the power of creative methods to enable a real engagement with others’ testimonies. Our workshops’ participants reflect on what they have read/seen/heard and create a collective “artistic” interpretation. We also co-produce multilingual educational materials in the form of videos, articles, cartographies and other creative and collaborative formats in different spaces, with different actors. We aim to develop a collective consciousness about the issues, methodologies and approaches that are essential in making a change in society.

Our other ongoing initiatives include Mujeres errantes: entrelazando vivencias/ Errant womxn: interweaving experiences. This initiative is a self-organised, voluntary, collectively managed group in Granada, Spain, where people who identify as “errant womxn” can connect and share experiences through collective creative activities. We have also held group sessions in Pécs, Hungary. During the COVID-19 lockdown period, we hosted an online group for women from different countries, some of whom were already part of the groups in Granada and Pécs, while some joined the group during lockdown. Our long-term goal is to extend the network by encouraging the establishment of local groups in various places. (You can read more about this initiative in our manifesto.)

While in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, the group Mujeres errantes also launched a call to contribute to Imaginarios de Cuarentena, an imaginary collective diary written in multiple languages.

We use the form of a diary – in a multimodal way – to inhabit our imagination. This can be used to point out the oppressions and inequalities that participants experience, touching upon on topics like migration, housing, care, gender inequalities, and so forth.

We have since relaunched this multimodal diary project, and we will be collecting more contributions and connecting them to activist visions of what can and should be done in our local communities to boost change.

This article was originally published on the blog platform of Gender Equality Actions in Research Institutions to traNsform Gender ROLES (GEARING-Roles), as part of the project's objective of bringing diverse voices into the debate on gender equality in academia. 

The views expressed in this post are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.