Dr. Astrid Jamar - Visual and Digital Cultures Research Centre (ViDi), UAntwerp & MSH guest professor

This participatory workshop explores arts-based methods as creative and collaborative means of unlearning the coloniality of peace. Moving beyond conventional academic approaches centred on rationality, objectivity, and textual and logocentric forms of knowledge, it invites participants to experiment with artistic practices as ways of questioning dominant narratives and opening up less “conventional” ways of knowing and imagining peace. Grounded in Black, Brown, Latinx, and Indigenous feminisms, the workshop approaches artistic practice not simply as a tool for illustrating or communicating research findings, but as a method of knowledge production, collective inquiry, and political engagement in its own right. Through creative and collaborative processes of knowledge-making, participants will explore how arts-based methods can foreground embodied experiences, situated knowledges, and forms of expression that are often marginalised or excluded from conventional academic settings. Unlearning the coloniality of peace thus involves more than critically examining established frameworks: it requires experimenting with different ways of sensing, relating, creating, and imagining alternative futures.

As a researcher working at the intersection of peace and decoloniality, Dr Astrid Jamar has engaged with scholarly, artistic, and activist spaces to explore how colonial legacies and liberal militarised peace interventions continue to shape peacebuilding practices and reproduce violence in different parts of the world. Drawing on her research and engagement across these spaces, the workshop will introduce collaborative arts-based methods as a means of challenging dominant modes of knowledge production and unsettling the academic binaries and hierarchies that structure Peace and Conflict Studies. By creating space for alternative forms of expression, collective reflection, and artistic experimentation, participants will be invited to critically engage with the ways knowledge about peace is produced, whose experiences and perspectives are legitimised, and how artistic practices might open up possibilities for thinking beyond colonial and militarised visions of peace.

Dr Astrid Jamar is multidisciplinary researcher based at the Visual and Digital Cultures Research Centre (ViDi), University of Antwerp. Her current research focuses on coloniality of peace, border thinking, knowledge hierarchies, and inter-imperiality within Burundian-Congolese borderlands and in Mexico. Over the past years, she directed the projects “Capturing Fluid Borders and Pluriversal Visions of Peace on the Tanganyika Lake Coast,” and “Dreams, Night Visions and Decolonial Aspirations across Burundian-Congolese Bordelands.” She published widely about the interplay of transitional justice professionals, institutions, norms, aesthetics, and epistemic violence from decolonial feminist perspectives. Prior joining the University of Antwerp, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh and at SOAS, as well as a lecturer in Global Development at The Open University, UK.

Thursday 12th November 2026, 10 am-1 pm

S.15.215
Campus du Solbosch - Bâtiment S - Niveau 15
Avenue Jeanne 44
1050 Bruxelles

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