Report by Billy Goodwin and Gertrude Cotter
Praxis Week 2026 brought together colleagues from across UCC, community organisations, international partners, educators, researchers and friends of the Praxis Project for a week of conversation, creativity, critical inquiry and connection.
This year’s week took place against the backdrop of what can sometimes feel like an increasingly fractured world: war and displacement, climate breakdown, growing inequality, racism and polarisation, and deep questions about whose knowledge, lives and experiences are valued.
But Praxis Week was not simply about identifying what is wrong.
It was also about asking what education can do.
How can universities help us understand the structures that produce injustice? How can we work across disciplines, communities and national borders without reproducing unequal relationships? How do we move from inclusion towards justice, from awareness towards action, and from expressions of concern towards meaningful solidarity?
These questions ran through a very full and very well-attended week.
Perhaps most importantly, there was a wonderful sense of people coming together. It was particularly lovely to see colleagues from the wider UCC community joining students, community partners and international collaborators, sometimes encountering Praxis and Global Justice Education for the first time.
Opening the week: education in a fractured world
We were delighted to open Praxis Week with Lassane Ouedraogo, Chairperson of the Africa
Solidarity Centre Ireland and University of Sanctuary Support Officer at Trinity College Dublin. Lassane has a long history of work in migrant and refugee rights, anti-racism and human rights advocacy in Ireland.
Lassane brought enormous energy, passion and generosity to the opening session and was extremely well received.
His contribution located our discussions firmly within the realities of a fractured world: migration and displacement, borders, racism and inequality, but also solidarity, belonging and the possibility of change. Drawing on Paulo Freire and Ubuntu, he challenged us to think about whether education merely helps people understand the world, or whether it equips us to participate in changing it. He also made an important distinction between simply describing ourselves as non-racist and actively embedding anti-racist practice within our institutions and educational spaces.
Migration provided a particularly powerful example of the connection between global crisis and local reality. Rather than seeing migrants primarily through narratives of need or deficit, Lassane spoke of people who move across borders as bringing knowledge, experience, ideas and new possibilities for the societies of which they become part.
His contribution spoke directly to one of the central concerns of Praxis: justice rather than charity. Genuine solidarity asks more of us than kindness or inclusion. It requires us to examine power, institutional structures and whose voices are heard.
It was a thought-provoking and very human beginning to the week.
Bringing In a Fractured World back to UCC
The keynote was followed by the return to UCC of our exhibition, In a Fractured World: Worlds We Live In, Worlds We Question, Worlds We Imagine.
There was something particularly satisfying about having the exhibition form the physical heart of Praxis Week.
It had already spent a month in Cork City Library, where Global Justice Education moved quite literally beyond the university classroom and into a public space. The exhibition combined short films, installations, artwork, posters, books, timelines, interactive activities and opportunities for visitors to respond to issues ranging from migration and the care economy to climate justice, Gaza, development and radical hope.
Bringing it back to UCC allowed the work to have another life.
Throughout the week, people could move between formal presentations and the exhibition: stopping to look at an installation, watch a film or discuss an idea with somebody else in the room. In this way, the exhibition became more than something displayed alongside Praxis Week. It helped shape the atmosphere of the week itself.
The exhibition grew from the work of UCC staff participating in the Praxis master’s-level micro-credential and Digital Badge, together with Palestinian colleagues. Their learning included critical and decolonial approaches to Global Citizenship Education and questions of colonialism, gender, environmental justice, migration, inequality, representation and voice.
Four short films explored education in Gaza, ancient wisdom and alternative understandings of community, radical hope, and the care economy. Rather than presenting answers, the films were deliberately designed as invitations to listen, question and make connections between local and global experience.
This creative dimension matters enormously to Praxis. Global Justice Education cannot only be something we explain. Sometimes an image, story, object, film or conversation enables us to encounter a question differently.
From the margins to the structures
On Tuesday Gertrude had the opportunity to present the third part of the Praxis research programme, 
drawing together seven years of work at UCC.
The central argument of the presentation was quite simple: Critical Global Justice Education is not an add-on.
It is a serious academic, pedagogical and public response to a world facing interconnected crises.
The research journey has included staff engagement and interdisciplinary case studies, large-scale student research, teaching and student projects, and most recently a consideration of institutional structures, academic policy and the future development of the field. The student phase alone included 748 survey responses and 23 in-depth interviews and found significant demand for accredited, interdisciplinary and action-oriented Global Justice Education.
Report 3 therefore asks a different question: if the interest, evidence and practice already exist, what must higher education now build?
The session generated very useful discussion around how Global Justice Education can move from the margins towards more sustained academic structures while retaining the criticality, creativity, partnerships and connection to lived experience that make the field distinctive.
Economic justice: looking beneath the surface
Later that day, Vicky Donnelly of Financial Justice Ireland did what Vicky always does so well: took
enormous and sometimes daunting questions about economics, poverty and global inequality and turned them into an energetic, participatory learning experience.
A key theme was the need to move beyond explanations of poverty and inequality which focus only on individuals or on visible symptoms.
Global Justice Education asks different questions: What structures produce poverty? Who benefits from existing arrangements? What histories are missing from familiar stories of development? What happens when we examine trade, tax, debt and colonial legacies together rather than treating poverty as an unfortunate condition requiring charity?
Vicky’s material explicitly places rights, justice, solidarity and structural analysis as alternatives to a charity lens and asks learners to interrogate the root causes of inequality and the flows of power and resources that sustain it. Her workshop used participatory activities to make those questions tangible and encouraged participants to reconsider assumptions that can otherwise remain invisible within education.
It was challenging, enjoyable and exactly the kind of pedagogy Praxis seeks to promote: serious questions approached collectively, creatively and without losing sight of the possibility of change.
Partnership across unequal worlds
Partnership was a particular focus of Praxis Week 2026.
Across two online conversations we heard from colleagues and partners connected with Praxis-supported work involving Palestine, Malawi, India, Peru and The Gambia.
The projects were very different, spanning education, performative pedagogy, digital technologies, crisis contexts, Indigenous and ancestral knowledge, planning, sustainability and community engagement. Yet some remarkably consistent themes emerged.
The first was reciprocity.
International partnership cannot mean knowledge travelling in one direction, from a university in Ireland towards somebody somewhere else. The Palestine, Malawi and India conversations demonstrated how much richer collaboration becomes when expertise, experience and learning genuinely move across borders and when partners have an active role in defining the questions and the work itself. The presentations explored areas including democratic education, performative pedagogy, artificial intelligence, educational resilience and open educational resources in crisis settings.
The Peru and Gambia discussions approached similar questions through ancestral and Indigenous knowledge, sustainability, place and community. They challenged conventional hierarchies in which academic or technical expertise is automatically privileged and reminded us that sustainable responses emerge through dialogue with communities, not interventions carried out on them.
Partnership, then, is not simply about having international partners. It requires continued attention to power, voice and relationship.
That is particularly important for Global Justice Education.
Film, Fanon and the unfinished history of colonialism
On Wednesday evening we changed pace again with a screening of Göran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning
Violence, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and archival footage of anti-colonial struggles in Africa.
The film is not an easy watch — nor should it be.
It opened a thoughtful discussion about colonial violence, resistance and the danger of treating colonialism as a period safely contained in the past.
One of the strongest themes in the discussion was continuity: how extraction, unequal power relations and systems of domination associated with colonialism continue to appear within contemporary political and economic life, although often in changed forms.
It also demonstrated why film has an important place within Global Justice Education. Film can unsettle us. It can complicate comfortable narratives and bring history into conversation with the present in ways that a lecture alone sometimes cannot.
Whose truth counts?
Thursday morning brought another particularly thought-provoking contribution from Dr Jody Moore-Ponce of UCC’s Department of Sociology and Criminology.
Her session, Whose Truth Counts? Lived Experience, Activism and Global Justice Education, asked us to look critically at concepts that have become very familiar within activism, education and public discourse: lived experience, personal testimony and “speaking your truth”.
Drawing on thinkers including Donna Haraway, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Joan Scott, Jody explored the enormous value of lived experience while resisting the idea that experience is somehow simple or beyond questioning. Personal testimony can illuminate injustice, disrupt dominant accounts and bring marginalised knowledge into spaces from which it has historically been excluded. But it cannot on its own substitute for historical, political and structural analysis.
That distinction created an excellent discussion.
For universities in particular, there is another challenge. It is not enough to “give people a voice” and then continue unchanged. Listening becomes meaningful when institutions are prepared to respond to what they hear.
That question — whose knowledge counts? — connected Jody’s session very strongly to the partnership conversations, the exhibition and the wider work of Praxis.
What Praxis Week reminded us
Looking back, what stands out most about Praxis Week 2026 is not any single presentation.
It is the connections between them.
Migration connected with education. Economic justice connected with colonial history. Lived experience connected with questions of knowledge and power. International partnership connected with reciprocity. Film and creative practice sat alongside academic research. Local conversations in Cork were connected to Palestine, Malawi, India, Peru and The Gambia.
And throughout all of this ran one underlying question:
What is education for?
At Praxis, our answer continues to be that education should enable us not only to understand the world but to question it and, crucially, to participate in changing it.
The week also reminded us of the importance of creating spaces within universities where difficult questions can be explored without expecting simple answers; where disciplines can meet; where community and international knowledge are valued; where creative practice sits alongside research; and where hope is understood not as passive optimism but as something we practise through solidarity and action.
In a fractured world, perhaps creating those spaces is itself a form of praxis.
Praxis is supported by Irish Aid, the Government of Ireland’s international development programme. The In a Fractured World exhibition and film project was supported by Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland through the New Foundations programme and developed in collaboration with Cork City Library and Cork Community Media Hub.