Conference Agenda

This presentation explores how people in Gaza and the West Bank experience the loss,
disruption, and resilience of learning during sustained crises, introducing two conceptual
tools—scholasticide and educide—to articulate these realities through the participants’ lived
experiences. Developed collaboratively with educators, students, and families in Palestine,
this work positions their narratives as knowledge in themselves, foregrounding how
education and learning persist, adapt, and resist under conditions of erasure.
Scholasticide refers to the systematic destruction of spaces, resources, and conditions that
sustain scholarship—schools, universities, libraries, and intellectual
communities—while educide encompasses the broader dismantling of educational life,
including informal, intergenerational, and cultural learning. Together, these terms invite a
reframing of how we understand learning as both a human right and a relational practice of
being, belonging, and becoming.
Through narrative qualitative inquiry, the paper draws on dialogic interviews, reflective
storytelling, and community-led documentation to reveal the human texture of learning amid
devastation. This work adopted a methodology of co-creation in care and waiting, developed
through sustained, affective communication with collaborators living under siege. It
foregrounds relational ethics, emotional labour, and the act of waiting as integral to
knowledge-making, positioning research as a shared practice of witnessing, presence, and
survival. It situates these lived accounts within global dialogues about resilience, epistemic
justice, and collective survival, extending beyond a Western analytical lens. Rather than
theorizing about Palestine, this research listens with Palestinians—recognizing their stories
as vital contributions to our shared understanding of education as a life practice.
By centring collaborative and experiential knowing, this paper contributes to the ECIQ 2026
theme of Global Flows, Connections, Dialogues and Collaborative Practices in Challenging
Times. It calls for an expanded vocabulary and methodology in qualitative research—one
that honours lived knowledge, challenges epistemic hierarchies, and opens pathways for
global solidarity in the face of educational erasure.

Governments often defend restrictions on expression as necessary for stability, yet a growing body of political science and psychology suggests the opposite: censorship can be strategically self-defeating. Sudden or expanded restrictions frequently trigger circumvention and politicization (e.g., VPN adoption and migration to blocked networks), heighten anger and “reactance,” push dissent into harder-to-monitor spaces, and thereby raise operational risk (e.g., intelligence blind spots) and, at times, violence. This paper develops a Montesquieu-style, natural-law argument: because speech flows like water, blocking it redirects, not dissipates, social pressure. Evidence from psychology and history are given while also reconciling evidence against free speech. It is concluded that; free-speech is a public dissidence tool and pressure-release infrastructure, counter-speech instead of censorship and transparency over bans. Network shutdowns lead to underground coalitions; if intervention is necessary, confine it to narrow, due-process-bound incitement with sunset clauses and auditability. The paper consolidates experimentally grounded mechanisms such as psychological reactance, group polarization, identity fusion, and the anger–fear balance, and situates them in legal-policy questions concerning speech regulation, incitement standards, information controls, and public-safety strategy. The historical analyses serve to external-validate these mechanisms and to clarify conditions under which legal speech interventions are more or less likely to be counterproductive. The recommendations, favoring counterspeech and transparency over blunt bans, reserving narrowly tailored, due-process-bound measures for direct and imminent incitement, and avoiding visibility-reducing network shutdowns, translate psychological regularities into legally relevant design principles

Amid the emergence of new global challenges, the persistence of racial inequalities across different contexts, histories and spaces reminds us of the enduring urgency to address our increasingly polarised societies. Scholarship and interest in allyship – as a collaborative, relational concept and transformative practice to bring people together– has surged.

This presentation actively engages with history, transcending geographical and temporal (historical) reach by turning to a previous critical juncture, the historical period of the 1960s USA, to understand the complexities of urgent interracial organising and the insights it can offer us. In drawing in specifically on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, or ‘Snick’), a prominent youth organisation within this movement, its initial ‘integrated’ approach, though intense and challenging, remains a valuable site for contemporary analysis. The organisation’s evolution and later focus on Black Power, meanwhile, offers room to reflect on the nature and requirements of coalitions themselves. This aims to harness the resiliencies and commitment from the past, specifically previous activists and allies, to seek hope and possibilities for practice for the contemporary landscape.

This archival analysis, drawing on materials housed in the Library of Congress, aimed to move away from archives presenting key leaders' stories and instead finds sources where ‘everyday’ activists published their own stories in fiction, through diaries, reflections, and in interviews (at the time or retrospectively). Such lessons derived from SNCC’s evolutionary history may be directly valuable to contemporary antiracist movements/institutions, or alternatively, individuals interested in further developing their allyship within their community and localised collectives. This presentation is centred on the inkling that across temporalities, the texture of what makes us human remains. Perhaps the past will hold lessons for how we may find solutions and come together in the future.

This project proposal concerns the psychological, sociocultural, and communal trajectories of the territorial conflicts experienced by the indigenous community of the Tolupán people, located in Montaña de la Flor (Honduras). Working through a decolonial lens, we plan to analyze processes and strategies of structural violence, land dispossession, state neglect, and resistance. We will work ethnographically and collaboratively with the participants’ community narratives and practices, privileging a decolonizing orientation. Central to the project’s methodology are territorial narrated walks (caminatas territoriales narradas), in which collective memory and lived experience emerge in relation to being with-in the very land that is now in danger. By walking and narrating their territory, Tolupán participants may articulate the interconnections between historical trauma, cultural resilience, and ecological belonging. The aim is to understand how “historical trauma” is seen, lived, remembered, and healed through Tolupán cultural logics, hoping to break away from Western pathologizing frameworks and advancing a community-based decolonial psychology that is grounded in territory, memory, and resistance.

In an era of intense social visibility, modern spaces like the gym function as sites of disciplinary power, creating challenging environments for relational connection. This study investigates how the "gaze" operates as a paradoxical power mechanism within the gym, a microcosm of contemporary society. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of discipline and Lacanian-inspired analysis of the gaze, this paper examines the visual strategies individuals employ to navigate constant observation.

This research utilizes a qualitative methodology combining autoethnography, semi-structured interviews with college students, and participatory observation. The study originated from the researcher’s own autoethnographic reflections on the "unsettled gaze", bridging personal experience with sociological theory. Analysis reveals that the gym’s interwoven gazes function dually as a form of hierarchical surveillance that produces "docile bodies" and, conversely, as a sought-after source of support and recognition.

To manage the social risks inherent in this contradictory visual field, individuals adopt "blurred focus"—a deliberate disengagement from eye contact by focusing on phones or equipment—as a primary self-protective strategy. This act of being physically present but visually absent is a crucial practice for survival. By examining these micro-level negotiations, this paper argues that understanding such collaborative, albeit subtle, practices of self-protection is key to fostering healthier relational connections. The findings suggest this framework can be transferred to other challenging spaces like the classroom to transform the judgmental gaze into a more supportive one.