Dr Lidia Guzy together with Cliona Maher (International Office UCC) co-create an itinerant international and intercultural Summer School in Bogota, Colombia

30 Apr 2026

Indigenous knowledge for the contemporary world – Oraliture

Summer School in Bogotá Colombia Dates: 16th -19th June 2026

Universidad del Rosario, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, University College Cork, Ireland

Venue: Bogotá, Colombia

This intensive intercultural summer school seeks to create a collaborative space for learning from and with Indigenous knowledge holders, in dialogue with ongoing debates around the decolonisation of Higher Education and the reconfiguration of academic knowledge production.

Rather than just idealising “small-scale” societies, the summer school highlights the contemporary agency of Indigenous communities and their collective strategies of resilience, cultural continuity, and political negotiation.

The programme centres direct engagement with respected Indigenous authorities and knowledge keepers — such as Mamu and Taita leaders — whose voices are essential in ongoing national and transnational conversations on sovereignty, climate justice, education, and sustainable futures.

Instead of treating Indigenous cosmologies and practices as timeless or purely symbolic, this summer school emphasises how they can inform concrete political and ethical responses to current global challenges. Their perspectives help rethink relationships between humans, territories, and non-human beings, while offering alternatives to prevailing logics of exploitation and inequality that characterise many contemporary institutions and governance models.

The summer school proposes a shift from “learning about” Indigenous knowledge to learning with indigenous leaders, recognising them as part of wider political struggles for recognition, land, self-determination, and epistemic justice. The goal is not to “translate” these perspectives into Western frameworks, but to create intercultural conditions in which different forms of knowledge can question each other, generate new understandings, and inspire collective responses to shared planetary challenges. This requires the use of creative and participatory methodologies, based on self-reflection, intercultural dialogue, collaborative work in small projects, and the use of art-based tools.

Organizers

Prof. Dr. Bastien Bosa, Full Professor of Anthropology, Universidad del Rosario. Bastien.bosa@urosario.edu.co

Prof. Dr. Carlos Miguel Gómez, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Dean School of Human Sciences, Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá.  carlos.gomez@urosario.edu.co

Prof. Dr. Miguel Rocha, Associate Professor of Literature, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá. Miguel.rocha@javeriana.edu.co

Dr. Lidia Guzy, Associate Professor Study of Religions, University College Cork.  l.guzy@ucc.ie