In this podcast series, Dr Mukuka Kasonde and Dr Brice Catherin continue their exploration of the concept of decolonial love which they first engaged with as an art exhibition in 2025. In conversation with guests, they critically reflect on how to imagine and enact forms of love that unsettle colonial hierarchies and open space for transformation.

In episode 1, Prof. Caroline Lenette takes inspiration from indigenous forms of knowledge to articulate ideas of love within and outside academia.

More about Prof. Caroline Lenette: www.unsw.edu.au/staff/caroline-lenette

More about Dr Mukuka Kasonde: www.linkedin.com/in/mukukakasonde/

More about Dr Brice Catherin: www.bricecatherin.org

More about the Decolonial Love exhibition: https://indd.adobe.com/view/9b19dbd9-ebd3-4725-a3c2-6b040d3446d9

Music: Christophe Schweizer (Switzerland) and Able Chanda (Banthu Ndiwo Traditional Dance Group, Zambia)

This episode was recorded at the online UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating 2025.

We Care delves into the intimate world of elderly care in Colombia, revealing how these tender moments become powerful rituals that weave collective memory and nurture peace within communities.

In Colombian families, caring for elders creates profound bonds that naturally transmit values and traditions across generations. This project illuminates how seemingly simple daily acts — like assisting with bathing or sharing a meal — transform into moments of deep reflection and connection. These caring rituals don't just meet physical needs; they create a tapestry of shared history that strengthens family ties and cultivates the empathy essential for lasting peace.

Through this lens, caregiving emerges as both deeply personal and profoundly political — an essential act for building a more compassionate society. By documenting these intimate moments, We Care contributes to Colombia's ongoing peace process, demonstrating how the transmission of memory through care serves as a vital safeguard against repeating the violent patterns of the past.

The project asks us to consider: in these moments of vulnerability and tenderness, who is truly caring for whom?

The presentation was by Diana Agámez, Luisa Machacón and Isabella Corvino. For their biographies and some examples of the photos, please see the full shownotes on our website: www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/podcast/.

This episode was edited by Catherine McGrath.

This episode is a recording of a presentation by Rezvan Sayyad, who presented a talk with this title at the 2025 online UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating. Rezvan is researching how rap music in Iran has become a contested space for representation, identity and resistance. For the full show notes, including the biography of the speaker, please visit www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/podcast/.

In this episode, recorded at the online UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating, we will hear from Prof Dr Bilgin Ayata, project leader of the research project Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century. This project, generously funded by the NOMIS foundation, proposes a new conceptualization of the border building on the concept of elasticity in physics. Thinking of borders as elastic offers new avenues to understanding not only how state borders stretch and retract, but also how they create fields of stress and violations in the processes of extension and retraction. Borders become elastic when they are extended either beyond or behind the territorial confines of a state.

The introduction and the editing were done by Catherine McGrath.

For the link to the project and Prof Dr Ayata's biography, please see the full show notes at www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/podcast/.

In this episode, recorded at the online UNESCO RIELA Spring School 2025, Anna Burgin shares her research into refugee resettlement in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Abstract:

Refugee resettlement, while offering refuge, is also what Pratt (1991) calls a “contact zone”, a space of contestation and unequal power dynamics. In Aotearoa New Zealand, resettlement is also dominated by the settler colonial government to the exclusion of Māori. This presentation will discuss the perspectives of NZ European volunteers supporting Māori-led welcome (pōwhiri) aimed at creating peaceful connections with former refugees and migrants in Dunedin. I discuss volunteers' reflections through the lens of Pratt’s contact zone and everyday peacebuilding as they discuss their positionalities in relation to the pōwhiri process and questions of belonging.

Anna Burgin is currently finishing her doctoral studies through the College of Education and Te Ao o Rongomaraeroa (National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies), University of Otago — a case study of refugee resettlement volunteers’ perspectives. She is an Assistant Research Fellow at Te Kura Ākau Taitoka ki Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka | University of Otago College of Education.

For the full show notes, including a glossary, please visit www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/podcast/.

This episode, recorded at the UNESCO RIELA Spring School 2025, is a discussion between Dr. Ray Di Marco Campbell, Dr. Haley Sneed, Jinming Liu and Gabriel, in which they explore contemporary and idealised community initiatives that take account of differences in residency status, recourse to public funds, employment opportunities, and access to quality nutrition in order to co-creative a peaceful and socially connected society. It draws upon the lived, professional, and community-based experiences of organising amidst hostile systems from the panellists, whilst also considering the financial and funding implications for the more formal charity sector and community member-run initiatives. Discussions on these alternative practices enables insights into mechanisms that can respond to the austere and hostile politics that plagues much of our society today, advocating for practices rooted in justice and meeting the needs of marginalised people.

Please visit www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/podcast/ for the full show notes, including the biographies of the speakers.

Timothy Peacock and Rebecca Sutton talk about peacegaming and their work at the Games and Gaming Lab at the University of Glasgow. This talk was inspired by their workshop at the UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating (May Peace Prevail), which took place in Glasgow in May 2025.

In this episode, Julie Ward, former MEP with a background in activism, talks about the Durham-based 'No To Hassockfield' campaign. Hassockfield is the site of an Immigration Removal Centre and the campaign was fighting for its closure, uses creative arts as a powerful tool to raise awareness of the harms caused by asylum detention and the need to provide community alternatives, whilst also providing a culture of care for the campaigners.

This presentation was recorded at the UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating 2025. This event gets hosted annually in person in Glasgow, Scotland in May and online in October. The next edition is due on 27-31 October 2025.

For the full show notes, please visit www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/podcast/

This episode is a recording of the opening keynote address Prof David Gramling delivered at the UNESCO RIELA Spring School: The Arts of Integrating 2025, in Glasgow, Scotland. Here is the abstract:

Good News

Bernice Johnson Reagon once sang for us a corrective teaching, along the lines that: “It’s ‘good news’ when you reject things as they are. […] And they don’t say ‘it’s good times’, they say ‘it’s good news’.” Fifty years later, these are definitely not good times. And, in this powerfully strange moment, even looking around for ‘good news’ often feels inappropriately consolational, often at fatal odds with the dreads and taunts of today’s geopolitical realism. This opening talk for our Spring School welcomes in the resources of “untimely optimism” (Feldman 2023), “out-of-phasedness” (Doumani 2007), “gramáticas de lo inaudito” (Acosta López 2023) and “anticipatory illuminations” (Bloch in Zipes 2019), in hopes of making room for a peace-in-this-time whose living vitality is the opposite of resigned quietism. To that end, we will meet head-on a few of the nightmares-of-the-self that may well haunt a peace-lover in Spring of 2025, seeking to expel that haunt and conjure in its place some unprecedented good news.

For the full show notes, including David's biography, please visit www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/podcast/

In this episode, Elder in Residence Mike Gonzalez interviews Mohammad Alkhatib and Daniel Calvert about teaching languages, inclusion, second language acquisition, ESOL, linguistic landscapes and translanguaging pedagogy. Please visit our website for the shownotes, including their biographies: www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/unesco/podcast/