Webinar: Working with Professionals to Develop Skills: Integrating Academic and Endogenous Knowledge

The purpose of this workshop is to reflect about the pedagogical, epistemological, methodological and political implications of working with communities to improve or develop professional skills in engaged research processes. The six presenters are developing projects which involve training members of the community to apply certain techniques.

We will discuss how our projects address the following dilemmas: How can we develop professional skills in ways that preserve and nurture indigenous / endogenous wisdom? How do we deal with moral, practical or technical discrepancies about professional work between academic researchers and local practitioners? In what way is the introduction of methods or techniques in local communities colonialist, and what cautions should we take to prevent epistemological colonialism?

Panelists: 

Félix Díaz
Félix Díaz (BSc Psychology, 1991, PhD Psychology, 1994) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the American University in Bulgaria. He formerly taught for 18 years at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). He has published a monograph on the problematics of body image, a text on qualitative assessment techniques in Speech and Language Therapy, a guidebook for dementia caregivers, and dozens of papers and chapters in the fields of mental health, qualitative social research methods and analyzing common and impaired conversation. He is interested in applying qualitative methods to understanding and improving life with disability.

Miguel Angel Castañeda
Miguel Angel is a professional in Languages and Cultural Studies from Colombia. He is a researcher on migration, climate change, humanitarianism, development policies, and decoloniality, and collaborates with various social and activist processes in Colombia against mining, and in defense of collective goods, and food sovereignty of the people. He is currently attending Bard College, where he is pursuing a Master's degree in Human Rights and the Arts.

Patricio Belloy
Patricio’s work explores how environmental, energy, and climate policies can concurrently support community development by means of needs-based approaches that promote knowledge co-production and meaningful engagement with local anchor institutions. He earned a BBA from Austral University of Chile, a Master of Science in Public Policy from UMass Boston, and a Master of Arts in Global Studies from Leipzig University in Germany and Wroclaw University in Poland. Patricio is a former MIT Mel King Community Fellow and a current PhD Candidate in Public Policy at UMass Boston’s McCormack Graduate School.

Martina Jordaan
Martina Jordaan serves as the Head of Community Engagement Research and Postgraduate Studies at the University of Pretoria Mamelodi campus. She actively collaborates with the Historical Society of Mamelodi and the Mamelodi Collaborative and contributes to providing skills training for early childhood development phase practitioners. In the past, Martina was responsible for a compulsory undergraduate module called Community-Based Project, which was part of the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment, and IT at the University of Pretoria. She holds a doctorate in History and a Masters's in Development Study. She served as the head of the Education Museum in Pretoria. During her tenure with the Gauteng Department of Education, Martina was responsible for the development of preschool teachers in the informal settlement close to Pretoria and in the skills development of staff at several schools in Pretoria.

Mónica Lucía Espinosa Arango
Mónica Espinosa Arango is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia).  She works in the sub-fields of political and environmental anthropology.  The approach called “the double ecology” (ecology of life and political ecology) applies multispecies ethnography and engaged and community based participatory research to questions on the arts of living in complex volcanic lifeworlds in the neotropics.  She leads projects on anthropology of life, social memory, and rural women resilience as a member of the interdisciplinary group Ecological History and Social Memory, based at Uniandes.  She also works closely with the Flor de Mayo Association along with the active collaboration of rural families inhabiting the vicinity of the Volcanic Complex Doña Juana – Cascabel in Las Mesas (Nariño).