With support from the Penn State College of Education, the Department of Learning and Performance Systems (LPS) and the Lifelong Learning and Adult Education (LLAED) program, and the Center for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) this complimentary virtual workshop series will reflect on uBuntu and Cosmo-uBuntu theorizing. The website for this event can be found here: uBuntu, Cosmo-uBuntu, and Anti-Racism: – A Multidisciplinary Approach to Justice in Education (psu.edu)
Cosmo-uBuntu is the voluntary embracing of uBuntu as a foundational value system in our participation in planetary conviviality; that is, the embracing of uBuntu as our perception of humanness and a worldview that informs our conviviality, without forcing universality. In this value system, personhood applies to all humans and precludes individuation, classifications, and hierarchies. In other words, humans are humans because of humans, thus race, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, ethnic and/or geopolitical origin are incommensurate categories. (Cossa 2018)
Agenda
Date: May 24, 2022 Time: 10AM – 2PM EDT
Virtual Platform: Zoom Meeting
Topic: Lifelong Learning and Adult Online and Distance Education
Fee: Registration is Complimentary
Working Group: Lifelong Learning and Adult Online and Distance Education
At the conclusion of the workshop, a working group will be formed to build upon the work that they conceptualized and will continue to work on deliverables upon which they agreed. Working groups will meet once per month for three months.
Organizer: José Cossa, Ph.D., Penn State University
Partners: Africa Special Interest Group (ASIG), CIES; Socially Just Academia (SJA); Virtually Connecting (VC); and, American Center for the Study of Distance Education
Panel-in-Conversation:
Maha Bali – Associate Professor, AUC/SJA/VC
Sinfree Makoni – Professor, Penn State University
Ladislaus Semali – Emeritus Professor, Penn State University
uBuntu is rooted in a perception of human that transcends the African context – personhood, defined as uBuntu, is not imposed-universalism, but inclusive-global (that is, all humans are ‘bantu/persons’). New theorizing with a Cosmo-uBuntu orientation must be built on faith in, and efforts towards, the recovery of memory of the myriad of the exterior’s epistemological sources and variations.
Tentative schedule:
- 10:00-10:10am Welcome
- 10:10-11:00am Panelists Synopsis
- 11:00am-12:00pm Panel in conversation
- 12:00-12:15pm Lunch Break
- 12:15-1:00pm Breakout
- 1:00-1:45pm Report back and summary
- 1:45-2:00pm Closing
