Community, Equity and Resilience

On 17 October 2025, Dr Tafadzwa Mushonga participated in a webinar on “Community, Equity, and Resilience,” co-hosted by the Knowledge Equity Network and the Global OER Graduate Network. 

Speaking alongside Dr Vasiliki Kioupi (School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds), the session spotlighted the work done on the Social Justice Jam 2024 project, Spaces for Change. This initiative explored how cross-continental collaborations between higher education institutions and community groups can drive meaningful social transformation, build equitable partnerships, and amplify the voices often left out of academic spaces. The discussion opened a window into real-world examples of research that bridges continents, disciplines, and lived experiences, as well as the challenges encountered in delivering this initiative.

Dr Kioupi and Dr Mushonga reflected on what they had learned from the Social Justice Jam, speaking about their experience of creating inclusive, co-designed spaces that honour both academic expertise and community knowledge, while fostering genuine change.

The full webinar is available on the Knowledge Equity Network YouTube Channel. 

Link and embed: https://youtu.be/V4jRxhhJ35s?si=o8DOKzBx1QnvOMI1

You can also read the reflections of two students from the University of Leeds on their experience working on this collaborative project. Dr Kioupi also shared her perspective on the impact and the future possibilities of this model of collaborative knowledge creation in an article for the Sustainable Development Solutions Network UK. 

Dr Tafadzwa Mushonga is the Deputy Director and Research Fellow at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria, where she co-leads the Environmental Humanities Research Cluster. Her research interests lie in nature-society relations, with a focus on the state and its relationship with people. Tafadzwa is a co-editor of volumes on “Environmental Humanities of Extraction: Poetics and Politics of Exploitation” (Routledge, 2024) and “The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarisation and Alternatives” (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022). In July 2025, her manuscript, “The Conservation of Violence: Statecraft, Forests and Coloniality,” was published by Routledge.

The Knowledge Equity Network brings together our community of signatories to build an effective, ambitious, and solutions-focused network that aims to bring research, education, and societal impact to the world in an equitable manner. This platform provides regular opportunities for the global community to come together through forums and discussions, advancing and monitoring progress as we work towards achieving openness as a global community.  The Network was established by the University of Leeds and the University of Pretoria in April 2023. 

The Global OER Graduate Network (GO-GN) is a network of PhD candidates worldwide whose research projects focus on open education, namely open educational resources (OER), open educational practices (OEP), and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The Network connects a community of practice, including PhD candidates, experts, and mentors, who research open education and work to develop open methodologies for research. A central aim of GO-GN is to promote equity and inclusion within the field of open education research, particularly for researchers from the Global South.