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.
Costis Hadjimichalis
Crises Spaces. Structures, struggles and solidarity in Southern Europe and Radical Geographies.
Lecture
Thursday November 06th 2025
14:00 (GMT+2)
Mezzanine, Post Graduate Room
Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly
Pedion Areos,Volos
Lecture within the framework of the courses
South: Space and non hegemonic paradigms of knowledge
Tutor: Iris Lykourioti
Ektos Polis: Researching the Urban otherwise: KTOS POLIS: Wanderings through ExtendedUrbanisation
Tutor: Metaxia Markaki
Biography
Costis Hadjimichalis is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Geography, Harokopio University Athens. He previously held a position at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and has been visiting professor at Roskilde University (Denmark), UCLA and Berkeley (USA), Panteion University, Athens (Greece), Oslo National University (Norway), NIRSA(Ireland), Macquarie University (Australia) and Universitá deggli Studi di Padova (Italy). His current research and publications concern uneven geographical development, local and regional development, radical geography, democracy and spatial justice and landscape analysis. He has been section editor of Regional Development for the International Encyclopaedia of Human Geographer, Elsevier and founding editor of the Greek journal Geographies. Among his recent books are Space in Left Thought (co-author Dina Vaiou, in Greek 2012), Debt Crisis and Land Dispossession (2014 in Greek, 2016 in German), Geographical Issues suited to non-geographers, (2016 in Greek), Crises Spaces. Structures, struggles and solidarity in Southern Europe, London: Routledge (2017, paperback 2019, modified Greek edition 2018) and Sketching urbanities in the Mediterranean (in Greek, 2021).
On Tuesday 4/11/2025 at 19:00 in the auditorium of the Department of Architecture, the results of the research project “SchoolNET: Innovative Tools for the Sustainable and Inclusive Refurbishment of Schools Building and Inclusive Mobility”, PR VENETO FSE+ 2021-2027 Priority 2 “Social inclusion and combating poverty”, will be presented, with:
University of Padova:
- Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering
- Department of Industrial Engineering
- Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology
- Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation)
IUAV University of Venice:
- Department of Design Culture
University of Thessaly:
- Department of Architecture
- Department of Early Childhood Education
New publication by the Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices
Care in Conflict: Artistic Reflections on Broken Worlds/Words
This publication seeks a rapture with the way we speak, taking language-as-care as the starting point for a reflection on what could critically resist the emergence nowadays of “care” both as a buzzword in the contemporary cultural scene and as an, often aestheticised, representation in various artistic and theoretical contexts.
The Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices commissioned texts from Gigi Argyropoulou, Ethel Baraona Pohl and Lisa Maillard, Elke Krasny and Svetlana Milevska who, in the context of this publication, strive to re-read care and its discontents and clarify antagonistic understandings and significations of care. They aim to better understand the fundamental role of care in the contradictions of social cohesion and social emancipation while addressing issues such as the Global South, care and curating, feminism, situated knowledge and affect. Informed by and based on a feminist perspective, they try to differentiate and raise consciousness on how these exact values are extracted by the globalised market to be invested in the rally of profit. As an epilogue, bell hooks’ “Teaching New Worlds/New Words” which has been included in its Greek translation (“Γλώσσα: διδάσκοντας νέους κόσμους, διδάσκοντας νέες λέξεις”), urges us to embrace new words as pathways to new worlds, as both a critical reflection and a heartfelt call to action, opening up possibilities for reimagining collective futures through language and care and underlining the understanding of our work as part of critical pedagogies.
The publication also includes a feminist index that operates as more than just a cataloguing or referencing system; it is a dynamic practice that brings to light otherwise peripheral or ec-centric positions, pathways, relationships, and interconnections of the partners of the Care Ecologies programme: The Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices, Mamidakis Foundation, State of Concept, Idensitat and WHW/ What, how & for whom. The publication has been realised as part of the Care Ecologies project, funded by the Creative Europe Program and the European Union.
As the double-faceted care (both radical and capitalized) tricks us, it is imperative to think about care ecologies, power relations and the cultural and geopolitical hegemonies as these are revealed by language and to take care of these ecologies in order to speak differently.
Care in Conflict: Artistic Reflections on Broken Worlds/Words
Edited by Elpida Karaba, Valia Papastamou, Marianna Stefanitsi, Ioanna Zouli
Contributions by Gigi Argyropoulou, Ethel Baraona Pohl, bell hooks, Lisa Maillard,Suzana Milevska, Elke Krasny
Translation by Afroditi Christodoulakou (English-Greek)
Copyediting and Proofreading by Damian Mac Con Uladh
Designed by Studio Lialios Vazoura
Printed by Kostopoulos Printing House
Bound by Androvik Dimitra
Published by University of Thessaly Press
ISBN: 978-960-9439-98-5
© Copyright, 2025, The Authors, CNMFPP and University of Thessaly Press, Volos.
All rights reserved
Τhe publication has been realised as part of the Care Ecologies project,funded by the Creative Europe Program and the European Union.
You can download the book as a pdf.
See the cover.
Λecture by Nikos Katsikis entitled Geospatial Metabolisms on Thursday 23/10/25 at 15:00 in Amphitheatre and online.
How can we understand the spatial dimension of urban metabolism?
How does the resource supply of dense urban centers shape interdependent, operational landscapes of primary production and transform planetary space?
And in what ways can this relationship be reimagined in a sustainable, resilient, and just manner?
Nikos Katsikis is an Assistant Professor of Urbanism at TU Delft, where he coordinates the Critical Environments research group , and a founding member of the Urban Theory Lab-University of Chicago. His research combines urbanization theory, spatial design, and geospatial analysis, aiming to understand and transform the spatial dimensions of urban metabolism. He holds a professional degree in architecture from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and a Doctorate from Harvard GSD, where he served as editor of the journal New Geographies and lecturer in Urban Planning and Design. He has also taught at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association, and the Politecnico di Milano, and serves as an external advisor to the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. His forthcoming books include Data-spheres of Planetary Urbanization and Environments of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2025).
https://criticalenvironments.nl/
http://www.terraurbis.com/
In the framework of the course
EKTOS POLIS: Researching the Urban Otherwise - Wanderings across Extended Urbanisation
Observatory of the Countryside
Tutor: Metaxia Markaki
For the connection link, please contact memarkaki@uth.gr
See the poster.