Pachaysana Institute
Pachaysana is a collective of Ecuadorian and international scholars, artists, development specialists and community organizers. Using performance-based methods, they create educational programming that responds to the ever-growing divide between local and global development. Pachaysana emphasizes A) bridging the local and global by way of education as a path toward re-imagining new methods of community development, and B) creating alternatives for local communities using strategies to diversity their economies while simultaneously strengthening local knowledge. Pachaysana’s vision is premised on the idea that locals need to learn from the global community and "globals" need to learn from the local community.
Autumn 2020: Epistemic Justice Workshop Series
In Autumn 2020, K’acha Willaykuna, the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese partnered with Pachaysana Institute to bring a series of virtual workshops on Epistemic Justice: Decolonizing Knowledge to Ohio State. This workshop/webinar series took a deep dive into decolonial thinking, drawing connections with our day-to-day lives and bridging theory to praxis. The workshops questioned what we understand as knowledge and who we consider as knowers by engaging with epistemological pluralism. We explored the colonial narrative of knowledge, identifying our dominant epistemologies as well as non-Western ways of thinking and being that have been excluded and devalued. The Pachaysana team then used creative exercises to collectively imagine what epistemological pluralism would look like in our lived realities. We explored Andean Cosmovision and the challenges and limits of engaging epistemological pluralism in higher education.
Some of the specific themes the Pachaysana team helped us explore this Fall included:
- Lived experience, theory and the metaphor of climate change to explain different worldviews and epistemicide (The session recording for this introductory webinar held on 9/18/2020 can be found here.)
- Identity and Pacha
- Radical listening, collective voice and radical dreaming
- Embodiment and connection between mind and body
- Belonging, space and place and topophila
Two of the Workshop Reflections can be viewed on our YouTube channel or below:
Our Distance Unlearning Hour from October 9, 2020 (Reflection on Pachaysana Workshop One)
Our Distance Unlearning Hour from October 30, 2020 (Reflection on Pachaysana Workshop Two)
Spring 2021: Storytelling for Social Change Workshop Series
In Spring 2021, work with Pachaysana Institute continued with a series of workshops on Storytelling for Social Change. This series of workshops in the Spring explores how stories have shaped our world, as well as how we can use them to identify and transform conflicts. It helps us see the power of stories in our day to day lives, as well as the dominant narratives and myths that define our societies. The goal is to imagine new narratives and storytelling methods that take us toward re-storying our world: the narrative act for collective healing and liberation.
Five of the Workshop Reflections can be viewed on our YouTube channel or below:
January 29, 2021 (Introductory Webinar/Workshop)
February 19, 2021 (Pachaysana Workshop One)
Our Distance Unlearning Hour from February 26, 2021 (Reflection on Pachaysana Workshop One)
Our Distance Unlearning Hour from March 12, 2021 (Reflection on Pachaysana Workshop Two)
April 9, 2021: Pachaysana Workshop Three
For more information, visit the Pachaysana Institute page above, our community page for the Pachaysana team’s biographies or the event link. Many of the Pachaysana workshops are also posted to our YouTube channel here.