22. Building a Fairer Tomorrow upon Situated Practices: Decolonial Creative Regeneration after Trauma

Abstracts for the session 22 (pdf)

This panel proposes a critical and practice-oriented discussion of decolonisation practices, with a particular focus on post-traumatic and post-disaster regeneration processes. While the academic and professional spheres are increasingly scrutinising systems and practices under a decolonial light, translating these into concrete proposals for restructuring intervention, governance, and regeneration remains uneven and often superficial. This session aims to move beyond rhetorical commitments to decolonisation by examining how creative, spatial, cultural, and institutional practices can actively reconfigure dominant paradigms of recovery, development, and care in ways that are actually receptive to local needs.

This panel invites contributions that address regeneration after but also amid and within disasters — natural and man-made ones, forced displacement, environmental collapse, conflict, and systemic violence—through grounded actions and practices.

We are particularly interested in cases where recovery processes challenge extractive, technocratic, or top-down models, instead mobilising local epistemologies, indigenous know how, and everyday-sourced knowledge as central drivers of transformation. Rather than idealising tradition or engaging in nostalgic narratives, contributions should critically explore how “uneducated,” informal, or marginal knowledge can be valorised, translated, and scaled without being appropriated or neutralised.

A core concern of the panel is the relationship between cultural processes and formal structures. How can decolonial values be embedded into rules, procedures, planning instruments, and institutional frameworks without reproducing colonial hierarchies? What kinds of creative practices—artistic, architectural, spatial, pedagogical, or organisational—can act as mediators between lived experience and formal governance? In this context, the panel also seeks to interrogate the credibility and accessibility of the Sustainable Development Goals, asking how they can be reinterpreted or reassembled through situated practices that respond to local histories of trauma and resistance.

Contributions should not only identify the limitations of dominant intervention paradigms but also offer concrete cases, methods, or tools that diversify how regeneration is imagined and enacted. Comparative perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome, as are contributions from different geographical contexts, especially those traditionally positioned at the margins of global knowledge production.

The session welcomes contributors from the academic, professional, and institutional spheres from diverse disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, aiming to foster a dialogue that advances decolonisation as a lived, material, and collective practice—capable of reshaping regeneration processes in more just, plural, and resilient ways.