The Paulo Freire Project of the discipline of Adult Education, School of Education, will be hosting a talk and discussion by Patrick Kane on:

Learning from "The Civic Strike to Live with Dignity" in Buenaventura, Colombia

WHEN:           4pm (to begin promptly at 4.30), Thursday 25^th April 2019

WHERE:         Centre for Visual Arts (main Pietermaritzburg campus) - please enter from Ridge Road (CVA is clearly signposted)

                                                                 ALL WELCOME.

DRINKS AND SNACKS WILL BE AVAILABLE – please RSVP (Anne Harley HarleyA@ukzn.ac.za) to ensure there’s enough!

From 16^th May to 6^th June 2017, the population of the Colombian Pacific port city of Buenaventura engaged in the  Civic Strike to Live with Dignity, which paralysed the city. Within two days, the strike had become an almost generalised uprising, involving people from all demographics and all neighbourhoods across the city. The strike cannot be understood without understanding Buenaventura's central importance to the Colombian economy, and to a neoliberal development model based upon free trade, extractivism and drip down economics. Buenaventura is Colombia's poorest and most violent city, yet it is the city through which 70% of Colombian imports and exports pass. Patrick will draw on interviews with a range of protagonists, as well as his own personal experience, to talk about the strike itself, and the social movement learning processes which arise from it.

Patrick Kane has been involved in solidarity activism supporting social movements and trade unions in Colombia for over a decade. He is currently completing doctoral studies at the University of Sussex in the UK, and recently spent two years based in southwest Colombia carrying out field research with social movements. He is also a research associate for a broader collaborative research project into social movement learning and knowledge production in Colombia, Nepal, South Africa and Turkey, funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council. 

The event will be co-hosted by the Church Land Programme.