Documentary Screening
TRANSFORMATION - A Settlement in Waiting
Thanos Karanikas and Dimitra Kosma
Ground Floor of the postgraduate hall
Thursday 13.11, 14:00
Siddique Motala
Storytelling, Heritage in 3D, and Counter-Surveying
Wednesday 12/11/2025, 14.00-16.00
Amphitheater, Department of Architecture, School of Engineering,
Pedion Areos
Volos GR
ABSTRACT: This presentation briefly introduces and explores several interrelated themes: (1) the use of storytelling in geomatics education, (2) 3D heritage documentation and research conducted by Global Digital Heritage Afrika, and (3) community work that has been done in areas of apartheid forced removals. In South Africa, geomatics education is an extension of the old land surveying education developed during the apartheid era. A critical intervention involved introducing storytelling into the geomatics curriculum. This then inspired the ongoing work of Global Digital Heritage Afrika, a research group dedicated to the digital documentation of heritage sites. Siddique will then describe his work in documenting the intangible heritage of communities who have experienced apartheid forced removals.
Bio
Siddique Motala is an associate professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the academic lead of Global Digital Heritage Afrika (GDHA), a research group dedicated to the digital documentation of heritage sites, monuments and museum collections. He has a BSc in land surveying, an MSc in digital photogrammetry, and a PhD in Education. His research interests are spatio-temporal mapping, storytelling, posthumanism, transportation, socially just pedagogies and decolonization in engineering education. For the last 15 years, Siddique has been mapping and researching District Six and other sites of apartheid forced removals. He conducts transdisciplinary research with a diversity of disciplines such as history, film & media studies, computer science, education, museum studies and archival studies.
The lecture forms part of the program of the international meetings South-South Dialogues: Spaces, Cultures, Languanges, Sciences realized in the framework ofErasmus + Mobility Program agreement betweenthe University of Thessaly, Greece and the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Kate le Roux
Thinking within the geopolitical South towards revaluing languages and literacies towards an in-common for/in STEM education
Wednesday 12/11/2025, 14.00-16.00
Amphitheater, Department of Architecture, School of Engineering,
Pedion Areos
Volos GR
ABSTRACT: Thinkers of a decolonial orientation highlight a (longstanding) inadequacy of dominant traditions of intellectual inquiry for ‘knowing’ and acting in a world that is increasingly experienced materially, inequitably, through related extreme weather events, resource depletion, health emergencies, poverty, policing of voice, war, (forced) movement, and a becoming of the digital ‘human’. Yet our thinking world is governed by principles of hierarchical separation, given life in the economic, political, social, linguistic, and technological processes of coloniality and its neocolonial and neoliberal afterlives. These principles are felt deeply and solidly - conceptually, physically and materially - in South Africa, and particularly in Cape Town, a city in which I live and practise as a teacher and researcher at an historically elite, public university. Pervading our work in this context are questions of how education might be a site of thinking and acting, anew, relationships towards liveability, with dignity and equality, for all living beings. I approach this problem from the perspective of ‘language’, prompted by thinkers of a decolonial orientation such as Gautam Bhan, Eduard Glissant, Ursula le Guin, Catherine Kell, Achille Mbembe, and Francis Nyamnjoh. I am reminded that it is precisely the ‘power’ of language that positions it centrally as the monolingual ‘root’ of coloniality, and that repairing the world requires voices of all the archives of the world. Thus, I am interested in the possibility of thinking and practising languages and literacies, in plural, as assemblage and intervention within the (dis)connections, (im)mobilities, (im)permanencies, and (un)certainties that characterise relations in an in-common. In this presentation I offer, humbly, my current thinking in this direction, and how I am working in research and education development in collaborations in STEM education.
Bio
Kate le Rouxis an Associate Professor in the Language Development Group, Academic Development Program, at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research, teaching, education development, and leadership are located in the interplay of languages, literacies, and mathematics in the sciences and engineering. She draws theoretically and methodologically on critical thought in mathematics education within the socio-political and socio-ecological, languages and literacies; and decoloniality. With a deep commitment to democratising knowledge and knowledge production, she is curious about issues of equity, justice, power, access, design, relations, and place in multilingual contexts. And she welcomes the opportunity to pursue this commitment in various journal editing roles, including as an Associate Editor of the African Journal of Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education. Kate was awarded a PhD in Mathematics Education by the University of the Witwatersrand in 2011. She was a Mandela Mellon Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & American Research at Harvard University in 2014. Currently, she is co-chairing the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction (ICMI) Study 27, ‘Mathematics Education and the Socio-Ecological’, and holds a Senior Fellowship on the UCT-Bristol Collaboration Program.
The lecture forms part of the program of the international meetings South-South Dialogues: Spaces, Cultures, Languanges, Sciences realized in the framework ofErasmus + Mobility Program agreement betweenthe University of Thessaly, Greece and theUniversity of Cape Town, South Africa.
Volos, November 11-13, 2025
Erasmus + Mobility Program
University of Thessaly & University of Cape Town
From the 11th till the 13th of November 2025, a number of international meetings are co-organized by the University of Thessaly and the University of Cape Town. The aim is to explore questions of decolonising our practices in relation to epistemic, ontological, linguistic, spatial, social, and ecological justice. The work is interdisciplinary: it draws theoretically from the social sciences and the sciences to explore reparative strategies for making our common worlds by drawing on plural ways of knowing, living and making, including disciplinary cultures in, for example, mathematics, architecture, design, engineering, the built environment, languages, and the arts. And it coheres around both critical posthuman, new materialist and epistemologies of the South thinking. Specifically, we explore how the curriculum and its enactment in pedagogic and didactic relations can harness historical and contemporary objects that help us re-story our spaces, re-pair our relations and re-think our practices towards more just conditions of living and making between peoples and between peoples and the Earth.
Hosted across various spaces of the University of Thessaly, these events include a series of public interdepartmental meetings with guest lectures, a student workshop, and joint classes that explore the onto-epistemological potentials and the limits of the ‘South’ as a perspective and method across disciplines. These exchanges seek to foster dialogue that engages with the rich body of theoretical production concerning disciplinary areas from below, situated within the diverse historical and geopolitical contexts of the South (of) Africa and the South of Europe. In doing so, they explore novel possibilities for producing knowledge challenging North–South binaries and their effects on disciplinary, cultural, scientific, linguistic, bodily, epistemic and ontic boundaries.
Collaborating institutions:
University of Cape Town (UCT)
Language Development Group, Academic Development Program
Department of Civil Engineering
University of Thessaly (UTH)
Department of Early Childhood Education
Department of Architecture
Department of Language and Intercultural Studies
Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries
Scientific & Organizing team (alphabetically):
Anna Chronaki / UTH, Early Childhood Education
Roula Kitsiou / UTH, Language and Intercultural Studies
Iris Lykourioti /UTH, Department of Architecture
Siddique Motala / UCT, Department of Civil Engineering
Dana Papachristou / UTH, Department of Culture, Creative Media and Industries
Petros Phokaides / UTH, Department of Architecture
Kate le Roux / UCT, LDG, Academic Development Program
The Department of Architecture of the University of Thessaly is organizing a conference on contemporary challenges for architecture and urban space and invites students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, young graduates as well as PhD candidates to participate in a critical dialogue on the current issues of Greek cities and the potential of architecture to become a tool for questioning and empowerment, shaping new collective dynamics and responses to social needs.