Registration via https://event.ugent.be/registration/CESSMIRSeminarEngagedScholarship from 22-03-2024 10:23 until 13-05-2024 23:59
Engaged Scholarship, Epistemic Justice and Societal Change by prof. Halleh Ghorashi and Dr. Elena Ponzoni
Seminar organised by CESSMIR and the Department of Social Work and Social Pedagogy
In this seminar we will discuss various approach of engaged scholarship and present how our understanding of this concept has evolved throughout our academic journey. We will show the importance of critical theory and feminist epistemology in approaching engaged scholarship from a transformative angle. Then we will zoom in further in discussing the ingredients of what we call transformative engaged scholarship which has epistemic justice at its core and meaningful co-creation of various forms of knowledge as its methodology. The aim of such scholarship is then to co-generate societal change together with societal actors towards inclusion on meso and macro level. We will present some examples from our research within expertise lab: Refugee Academy at the VU to elaborate further on the importance of such form of engaged scholarship for academia, for society and for refugees.
Halleh Ghorashi is Full Professor of Diversity and Integration in the Department of Sociology at the VU (Vrije Universiteit) Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She combines a multidisciplinary background in social sciences (anthropology, sociology, gender studies, (political) philosophy and organization studies) with a critical approach in diversity and refugee/migration studies and narrative (co-creative) methodology. In 2017, she received prestigious VICI grant on Engaged Scholarship and Narratives of Change from NWO. In 2018, she is appointed as a Crown Member of the SER (Dutch Social Economic Council) and in 2020 as a member of KNAW (The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences). In 2021 she received Amsterdam Impact Award for her research about refugees and diversity. www.hallehghorashi.com
Elena Ponzoni is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology of the VU Amsterdam, she has a leading rol in the expertise lab Refugee Academy and director of the Co-Creation for Inclusive Knowledges Lab at the Faculty of Social Sciences (VU Amsterdam). Her work focuses on how academic research can contribute to make visible and change implicit mechanisms of exclusion and inequality, through participatory methods of knowledge co-creation centering the experiences of the communities at stake. Among other she works with refugee advocates to create space for refugee perspectives in knowledge production and policymaking, and focuses on the importance of art practices for democratic resilience. She has also done years of research in the youth domain in the Netherlands, focusing on formal and informal parenting support.