Date: 10 June 2026, 15:00-17:00

We invite you to experience a moment of connection through caring listening. In this space, we listen to understand, to acknowledge, and to bear witness - opening the possibility to transform our views, attitudes, and behaviours that may deny, dehumanise, or marginalise the lives and experiences of others.

Lectura Ritual is a reflective and participatory space nourished and implemented by the Knowledge in Action (KIA) Research Group, where we read and engage with  testimonios of survivors of Colombia’s armed conflict. 

Inspired by ex-commissioner Alejandro Castillejo and his pedagogical team, this practice turns reading into a ritual of listening, witnessing, and collective care. As one of KIA’s initiatives to sustain the legacy of Colombia’s Truth Commission, Lectura Ritual contributes to a deeper understanding of the impacts of violence and supports local socio-cultural transformation. 

KIA and Dr Nancy Carvajal Medina are proud members of Colombia’s Truth Commission Ally Network, working to connect research, pedagogy, and community practice with processes of memory, reconciliation, and peacebuilding.

Date: 11 June 2026, 11:30-12:45

This workshop builds on critical interrogation to reimagine research as a relational, ethical, and transformative praxis. 

Drawing on indigenous and feminist frameworks, it centres the understanding of research as ceremony (Wilson, 2008) - a practice grounded in accountability, reciprocity, and collective meaning-making (Kovach, 2009). 

Participants engage in rethinking their methodological approaches by foregrounding relationality, embodied knowledge, and community accountability, particularly within Global South and marginalised contexts. Through reflective writing and collaborative dialogue, the session supports researchers in translating critique into concrete methodological shifts that resist 'extractivism' and disrupt colonial logics. 

Emphasising a pedagogy of possibilities, the workshop invites participants to enact decolonial praxis by designing research practices that are accountable to communities, territories, and the ongoing responsibilities of knowledge production.

Date: 17 June 2026, 15:00-17:00

Professor Gloria Anzaldúa draws on the Nahuatl word Nepantla, which means “being in the middle,” to name that transitional space where, despite discomfort, a new version of ourselves can also emerge. 

This workshop engages participants in a relational and transformative space grounded in indigenous Latin American and Chicanx/Latinx feminist epistemologies.

Drawing on the methodology of the círculo de palabra (Word Circle), the Espacios de Palabra Viva creates a ceremonial, community-centred environment where knowledge emerges through dialogue, storytelling, and witnessing. Participants navigate liminal or transitional spaces - personal, professional, or academic - reflecting on experiences of uncertainty, fear, and fragmentation while situating themselves within larger social, cultural, and territorial contexts. 

The session begins with gentle body activation and presence exercises followed by social theatre, allowing participants to enact everyday situations in which identity politics play out in academic, educational, and social contexts. The session will close with a meditation practice. These circles have been a collaboration between Knowledge in Action - KIA Research Group and Colectivo Habitarnos. 

Date: 18 June 2026, 13:30-14:45

This workshop engages participants in a critical examination of the neo-colonial conditions that shape contemporary research practices, with particular attention to how power operates through knowledge production. 

Grounded in Chicana/Latina feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, the session centres positionality as praxis, inviting researchers to interrogate how their identities, institutional locations, and epistemic assumptions are entangled with colonial hierarchies of authority, representation, and extraction. Through reflexive and dialogical processes, participants move beyond abstract critique to identify their own complicities within research structures, mapping how knowledge, benefit, and power circulate in their projects. 

The workshop creates space for rigorous self-location and accountability, positioning reflexivity as a necessary foundation for ethical and transformative research.

Date: 19 June 2026, 11:30-12:45

In this experiential workshop, participants will be immersed in practices that invite to re-connect with oneself, others and Mother Earth. 

This space also invites to explore the shift from anthropocentric to biocentric ways of thinking, knowing, and researching. Drawing on the principles of The Work That Reconnects, participants are invited to critically examine how dominant academic paradigms position humans as separate from and above the natural world, and to experiment with alternative perspectives that situate research within a web of interdependent life. 

Through reflective dialogue, guided exercises, and creative inquiry, the workshop opens space to reframe research questions, ethics, and methodologies in ways that are relational, ecologically attuned, and responsive to the more-than-human world, supporting scholars to align their work with the flourishing of all life. As an active member of Colombia’s Truth Commision Ally Network, the facilitator will share the experience of using this methodology through Re-conectando Foundation to support Colombia’s Truth Commission in generating dialogues between survivors of the armed-conflict and those responsible for inflicting violence.