{"id":5050,"date":"2026-10-28T01:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T23:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kehitystutkimus.fi\/conference\/?page_id=5050"},"modified":"2026-10-28T01:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T23:16:08","slug":"wg-14-learning-otherwise-becoming-one-unity-popular-pedagogy-andragogy-and-action-research-as-new-dynamics-of-collective-power","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.kehitystutkimus.fi\/conference\/working-groups\/wg-14-learning-otherwise-becoming-one-unity-popular-pedagogy-andragogy-and-action-research-as-new-dynamics-of-collective-power","title":{"rendered":"WG 14: Learning Otherwise, Becoming One: Unity, Popular Pedagogy, Andragogy, and Action Research as New Dynamics of Collective Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

Coordinator:\u00a0\u00a0<\/b>
\n<\/span>Abirlal Mukherjee (<\/em><\/span>University of the People, California, USA)<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span>Description:
\n<\/b>At a moment when development is increasingly entangled with ecological breakdown, geopolitical fragmentation, technological acceleration, digital colonialism, and the renewed concentration of economic and epistemic power, education cannot remain merely an instrument for producing adaptable workers for an unstable future. This Working Group asks a more fundamental and disruptive question:<\/span><\/p>\n

What if education were reclaimed as a collective infrastructure through which people could contest extractive systems, democratize knowledge, defend ecological commons, and collectively construct alternative futures?<\/span><\/p>\n

Drawing critically on Paulo Freire’s <\/span>Pedagogy of the Oppressed<\/span><\/i>, bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ epistemologies of the South, Arturo Escobar’s pluriversal thinking, Elinor Ostrom’s commons scholarship, and wider decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, ecological, and critical traditions, the Working Group explores popular education, formal education, and participatory\/action research as practices of collective empowerment rather than technologies of individualized human-capital formation.<\/span><\/p>\n

The central concern is particularly urgent amid the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, Big Tech, platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, data extractivism, and digitalisation. These technologies do not simply transform classrooms. They reorganize labour, social reproduction, knowledge production, resource consumption, and geopolitical power. Data centres intensify demands for energy and water; digital infrastructures generate new material and ecological frontiers; AI systems reproduce linguistic, cultural, and epistemic hierarchies; and platform economies increasingly mediate who can work, learn, speak, organize, and participate.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Working Group therefore asks: Who produces technological knowledge, and who controls its infrastructures? Whose languages, memories, bodies, territories, and labour become data? Can digital technologies become commons rather than new architectures of extraction? What would technological sovereignty look like from the Global South? And can education cultivate collective technological agency rather than technological dependency?<\/span><\/p>\n

A particular focus will be placed on participatory action research as a counter-methodology to extractive development research. Rather than positioning communities as passive recipients or objects of intervention, action research can make them co-producers of knowledge, diagnosis, policy, and transformation. We welcome contributions on popular and community education, critical pedagogy, critical digital literacy, youth-led research, feminist and Indigenous methodologies, environmental education, South\u2013South knowledge production, decolonial research, digital commons, degrowth, pluriversal futures, and struggles surrounding land, water, biodiversity, labour, and ecological justice.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Working Group ultimately seeks to move beyond the familiar binary of technological optimism versus technological pessimism. Its ambition is to explore education and research as infrastructures of collective resistance, ecological care, epistemic justice, democratic participation, and transformative world-making.<\/span><\/p>\n

The question is therefore not simply how education can prepare people for an uncertain future, but who gets to define that future, whose knowledge counts in producing it, what forms of life it sustains, and whether development itself can once again become a project of collective emancipation rather than adaptation to an increasingly unequal world.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indicative Themes<\/b><\/em><\/p>\n