First workshop of the project:
“Post-colonial perspectives on global racism.
Resistance and inclusion of migrant voices in educational work critical of racism”
The first workshop took place on November 12th, 2022, in the OBUK organization’s building, and aimed to generate the space for communities to begin to get to know each other and discover the similarities and differences in the histories of our territories of origin. Through this, there is the opportunity to identify and explain from our perspectives the historical events and processes that have characterized recent social uprisings in our territories and how this is linked to historical colonialism perspective till the present. Through these perspectives, we further enter into discussions about what we understand by racism, colonialism, and its interrelationships mean.
We started the journey by getting to know each other through the “sociometry” activity, where we talked a bit about our stories and political experiences. With this, we started to exchange some interesting ideas about what we understand by: “activism” and “non-formal education”. Both concepts that we often use but don’t often stop to understand what we mean by them.
Also present in our day was the desire to better visualize potential future networks through the ways we have to organize our struggles and communities. Therefore, in a second activity we shared about the collectives and the different ways we have had to organise politically as migrants in Berlin on various different issues, such as support for migrants and refugees, making the struggles in our territories visible in Berlin, the role of German today in various parts of the world, among others topics.
Towards the end of the day we had a interesting exercise of reconstructing history from our perspective: we collectively created a timeline of important events that help us to understand the various events that led to the latest social uprisings in Chile and Sudan.
These events are so intertwined with different areas and issues, regional and global facts, and ways of approaching them, that it is interesting to do the collective exercise of historical reconstruction. We learned from listening to our partners, as well as from the differences and similarities we could find between the contexts of both territories.
We are happy to have met and initiated the project, and excited to continue learning and sharing our experiences in order to translate them into an educational method with an important social and political impact.