OtherWise Wageningen

Join this dynamic and reflective workshop with Niki & Katha, where we will explore the themes of decoloniality, accountability, and responsibility. Using the "7 steps forward, 7 steps backward or aside" framework, we will open up a space for awareness, self-reflection, and meaningful conversation.

This workshop will invite participants to examine the inner work required to confront and unlearn colonial mindsets, especially for those of us living in the Global North. Through dialogue, movement, and community-building, we will raise essential questions of accountability:

What does it mean to take accountability for historical and ongoing inequities? How do we navigate our roles in systems of power and privilege? What does this inner work of deconstruction look like?

Together, we reflect on power, privilege, complexity, and positionality, creating an inclusive and brave space for everyone to share their perspectives. The aim is to foster a sense of connection and community that will inspire participants to carry this work forward.

This is an invitation to move together—whether we take steps forward, backward, or aside—as we engage in this collective journey.

⏰When? 5th December 2024, 5 -7.30 pm
📍Where? Clochouse (Generaal Foulkesweg 37, Wageningen), room: old library
🍒Snacks and Drinks provided

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uIjIAQP8HShu1L5E1U8uW1Z0P_HZDI43nvZMx4WUE9Y/edit

We invite you to the  Capita Selecta Course (4ECTS): Building Community: Strengthening our Activism
In Period 3 & 4, 2025

Overview 
In attempts to bring change to a complex system, activists and those who work for alternatives face oppression, exhaustion and isolation. To sustain our efforts, we need to find sources of empowerment and nourishment that allow us to continue doing our work.  
But what keeps us together? What makes us continuously show up for each other?  

We think community is a central notion. Community is another way to understand, organize society, and to live life - an alternative to 'individualistic society'. Communities can support and strengthen the individual by creating relationships that promote collective action and social change, allowing them to deviate from the hegemonic model of capitalist patriarchy.

With this course, we wish to create a brave space to come together in community, hold each other in care, and work on core questions like: 

 • How can the way we live/be more coherent with the world we want to create? 
 • How are our own intimate questions around grief, gratitude, power, meaning, love and sexuality linked with our politics? 
 • How are we perpetuating ourselves the very dynamics we seek to interrupt? 

We believe the success of our social movements relies not only on efficient mobilization and strategy, but also on resilient communities grounded in deep relationships. As adrienne maree brown suggests, “What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.” With this course, we aim to turn ourselves into laboratories of transformation and experiment with inner shifts as seeds of new possibility for the struggles and contexts we're part of.  

In this course, we aim not only to create a shared space for knowledge and experience but also to develop practical tools and frameworks that you can apply within your activist and community groups. 

Find more info under Courses 2024/2025 .

Elective Course: Resistance, Power, and Movements, March - April 2025 (March 14,15,16 - April 4,5,6 - April 24, 2025)

What do 'activism' and 'being an activist' mean in today's political context? What are the different options that citizen groups and (activist) social movements have to organize around the topics they consider urgent? How to organize a sound and constructive movement or action group? What can be learned from the past's social movements and mobilizations? How can theories on social movements, activism and resistance be useful for organizing an impactful action? How to (be)come an agent of change? How to combine activism and academia and/or be an activist scholar? 

These questions are central to the elective course “Resistance, Power and Movements”, a collaboration between OtherWise and the Sociology of Development and Change group.

Register via OSIRIS (use the QR Code or Course Code)

For any questions, write to otherwise@wur.nl.

Hii everyone 🍉
The lino print workshop that took place in June brought to life this beautiful collective print designed and carved by a small group of passionate people in Wageningen.
We are so proud to announce that we started with the printing and distribution of the poster with an aim to raise money for the organization of Musicians Without Borders in Palestine.
You can find more information on how to get your poster and make a donation here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1U8C2ZZvHz33kZA3pmqKn58FgDFtuxBDk5TkP_XdSqgE/edit

This Saturday, November 23, a march will be held in Wageningen city center to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This event aims to raise awareness and support the fight against gender-based violence.

Join us for a workshop and introduction on spiritual ecology on Saturday November 16!

What is spiritual ecology? It is a framework to navigate our current socio-ecological polycrises, by recognizing the spiritual dimension of the world. To move forward, we must re-examine our attitudes and beliefs about the earth. In this workshop we will explore how spiritual practices offer us a way towards deepening our kinship with the human and the more-than-human world. We also hope to offer a follow-up course on spiritual ecology in 2025.

This event is facilitated by Annick Nevejan and Ania Ektate, and is a collaboration between Spectrum, OtherWise and the Spiritual Ecology foundation of the Netherlands. We will be serving a vegan lunch during the event, as well as coffee and tea during the break times.

Sign up here 🦋 https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdqzOwSYnO6QQQNol7UZ7t2oCyHsrNFgwGm5Gv8tiEm1X7NRA/viewform

When: September 30, 5.30-8 PM
Where: old library, Clockhouse in Wageningen

Register here: https://forms.gle/miHyjUEtsN9QM7Du6

The social cartography “The house modernity built”, developed by the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective (GTDF), was inspired by Audre Lorde's famous insight that  “… the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” How do we collectively build alternative modes of existence on a planet facing unprecedented crises?  

''The House Modernity Built'' is a metaphor that invites conversation around the modern/colonial global imaginary in which being is reduced to knowing, profits take precedent over people, the earth is treated as a resource rather than a living relationship, and the shiny promises of states, markets, and Western reason are subsidized by the disavowed harms of impoverishment, genocide, and environmental destruction.

Using the metaphor of a house, we will explore modernities' architecture through a listening meditation, and craft a house that imagines alternative modes of existence in a context where the house appears to be crumbling, and, indeed, has always been a fantasy.

When:  June 20th from 5-7PM

Where: Forum C0221 (hybrid-online)

'Palestinian Seed Stories' by Vivien Sansour is the lecture culminating the seminar series 'Beyond Sustainability: Theorizing Post- and Anti-Capitalist Food Futures'.

To Eat Alone is to Die Alone* Oftentimes when Palestinian farmers put seeds in the ground, they mutter a quiet prayer, “may we eat and may we feed others”. This and many other linguistically profound sayings provide a lens into a cultural design based in the idea that our survival as individuals is connected to the well-being and survival of our community. In this time together we will be invited to let go of our commitments to and preconceptions with “reality” in order to allow ourselves to imagine alternative universes that are inspired by nature and her daring imagination. From the real to the fantastical, we will engage in a hybrid and intimate activity of being physically present with other living beings, while channeling this co-presence into a writing activity that will bring us deeper clarities about who we have been, who we are , and whom we would like to be. This session will take us through a short but profound trip into our own spirits, the spirits of other people, and the seeds that help us weave stories to navigate a world that is in a state of hospice. For instance, how did imagination, nature, and science come together to make it possible for humans to develop bread from a wild grass, and how might this relationship of co-creation between humans and other beings inform our future? These questions call for urgent contemplation, because many of the things we love are dying or are already gone. We will have to learn how to grieve, and even how to die, together, in order to rebirth a new world in which we become “better designers”, together. *A Palestinian Proverb

Vivien Sansour is an artist, storyteller, researcher, and conservationist.

She uses image, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for the protection of biodiversity as a cultural and political act. Vivien works with a global network of farmers and seed advocates to promote seed conservation and agrobiodiversity. As part of this effort, she founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, with the goals of finding and reintroducing threatened crop varieties and collecting stories to assert the ownership of seeds by communities.

More information about Vivien: https://viviensansour.com/

Join us in Impulse this Thursday for "Colonialism & Meat - how white supremacy and cattle changed the 'Americas'"

When: Thursday, June 20, 19:00-21:00
Where: Impulse, Speakers Corner

Did you ever wonder about white supremacy in regards to food? Or how weaponizing animals for enclosure of the commons and ecocide has gone hand in hand? In this event we’ll look at historical events around colonialism and cattle and ask questions about what multispecies justice could look like in the context of decolonizing land, culture and diet.

Chihiro Geuzebroek works as a multidisciplinary activist and artist on restoring and re-storying our relationship with earth and each other. She has been a climate justice speaker,organizer and creative since 2009. Her politics and her Dutch-Bolivian with Quechua ancestry has put her on a path of advocating solidarity for Indigenous struggles for land and environmental justice. She is co-founder of the decolonial foundation Aralez.

When: June 23rd from 3-5PM

Where: Belmonte Arboretum (Generaal Foulkesweg 94-A, Wageningen)

In the Belmonte Arboretum, one can find a great collection of trees from all around the world. However, the diversity of trees all refers to a monoculture narrative, which is Western modern science mood from classification, taxonomy and knowledge as possession. Yet the trees used to hold so many sacred relationships in their original territories in the temple of life. One may start to listen to their hidden stories when listening to the silence because silence has something to tell.

The approach where humans transform life into resources, as owners of the world, and transformed nature into an object of study, has brought us to a condition of Earthlessness and Worldlessness. However, it has not always been the way and it is certainly not our defining human nature. There are other worlds of meaning, where humans hold a radically different relationship to Earth. We want to learn together from these other worlds of meaning which have been protecting life. Like the trees, many of us are also uprooted from our territory, disconnected from our ancestral knowledges. How can we heal the relationships by remembering our roots and start weaving connections?

Weaving Realities invites you to a workshop where we activate our bodies and listen to the stories of the trees, the soil, the water and the wind, and sow a seed of memory.