Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist. "The Old Poets of China" by Mary Oliver
co²libri 2025 Spring School - Reimagining the University: Confronting Coloniality, Safeguarding Academic Freedom, Nurturing Alternative Paths of Learning | Lecture Dialogues
co²libri 2025 Spring School - Reimagining the University: Confronting Coloniality, Safeguarding Academic Freedom, Nurturing Alternative Paths of Learning | Lecture Dialogues
Details
The UP Asian Center, in partnership with the Center for International Studies and the DLSU-Southeast Asia Research Center and Hub (SEARCH) invites you to the CO2LIBRI SPRING SCHOOL Lecture Dialogues, "Reimagining the University: Confronting Coloniality, Safeguarding Academic Freedom, Nurturing Alternative Paths of Learning," on 3 - 7 March 2025, 10:00 AM, PST (GMT+8) at the ASEAN Hall, UP Asian Center and the Henry Sy Hall Roofdeck, De La Salle University Manila. This event is free and open to the public. Online pre-registration is recommended due to limited seating.
ABOUT CO2LIBRI SPRING SCHOOL: Lecture Dialogues
Threats to academic freedom, especially directed against progressive scholarship, have been intensifying in various parts of the world. These are manifested in surveillance, repressive policies, militarization of campuses, withholding of funding and employment, and outright physical harm against students and scholars. Such repressive tactics go hand in hand with the increasing auditing of universities according to neoliberal parameters and logics and the continuity of Eurocentric, racist, heteropatriarchal and supremacist knowledge making that preserve the hierarchization of lives. These urge us to ask: What should the university be? For whom and for what is learning and knowledge production? How can academic freedom that sustain these visions of the university be safeguarded in contexts of intensifying threats? And what are alternative paths of learning that are already being practiced in various parts of the world, especially by marginalized groups, that refuse and resist neoliberal, capitalist, racist, hetero-patriarchal, Eurocentric, and imperialist education and thus offer concrete ways of decolonizing learning and knowledge making?
This Spring School brings together students and scholars from across and beyond the co2libri network to deliberate on these questions, co-learn, and share experiences, knowledges, and practices towards reimagining the university.
3 MARCH 2025 | 10 AM (GMT+8) | Asean Hall, UP Asian Center
"Reimagining the University: Contemporary Challenges and Visions for the Future"
Fidel Nemenzo, DSc Professor and Former Chancellor, University of the Philippines Diliman
FIDEL NEMENZO, DSc, is Professor of Mathematics and served as Chancellor of the University of the Philippines Diliman (UPD) from 2 March 2020 to 2 March 2023. He studied in UP Diliman and Sophia University in Tokyo, where he obtained his Master of Science and Doctor of Science degrees. His areas of research are number theory, elliptic curves and coding theory. Among the awards he has received are the Achievement Award in Mathematics from the National Research Council of the Philippines and the UP Diliman Gawad Chancellor Para sa Pinakamahusay ng Guro. He was President of both the Southeast Asian Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Society of the Philippines, and has held research and teaching posts in Singapore, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Munich and Phnom Pehn. In 2019, Dr Nemenzo was elected to the Governing Board of the National Research Council of the Philippines and chairs its Division of Mathematical Sciences.
SOL IGLESIAS, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of the Philippines Diliman
SOL DOROTHEA IGLESIAS is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of the Philippines-Diliman and currently a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. Since 2024, she has been on the New Mandala editorial advisory board and a convener of Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences. In 2023, she was awarded the Mellon/Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Fellowship and she was the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence of the Justice in Southeast Asia Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023. Her research includes anti-crime violence in Southeast Asia as well as political violence and democratic backsliding in the Philippines. Sol is a core group member of the Network in Defense of Historical Truth and Academic Freedom.
4 MARCH 2025 | 10:30 AM (GMT+8) | Asean Hall, UP Asian Center
"Nurturing Alternative Paths and Spaces of Learning"
Arnold P. Alamon Mindanao State University - Iligan Institute of Technology
ARNOLD P. ALAMON currently teaches Sociology at the Mindanao State University-Iligan Institute of Technology where he also serves as the Peace Research Coordinator of the Institute for Peace and Development in Mindanao of MSU-IIT. He authored the books “Wars of Extinction: Discrimination and the Lumad Struggle” in 2017 and “Nation in Our Hearts: Essays on Mindanao” published in 2017 by the UP Press. He finished his undergraduate and master’s degree from the University of the Philippines-Diliman where he taught for several years in the early part of his career but later moved back to Mindanao where he now teaches and undertakes research in MSU-IIT. His expertise include indigenous studies particularly on the Lumad, peace and conflict studies, and the political economy of Mindanao.He is finishing his PhD and currently on study leave.
5 MARCH 2025 | 10 AM (GMT+8) | Henry Sy Hall Roofdeck, De La Salle University
"Safeguarding Academic Freedom"
Br. Inigo Riola, FSC De La Salle Brothers, Inc.
BR. INIGO RIOLA, FSC is an educator and a member of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a Catholic teaching order commonly known in the Philippines as the De La Salle Brothers. He currently serves as the Vice Provincial Superior / Auxiliary Visitor of the Lasallian East Asia District. He holds a Doctorate in Educational Leadership from Saint Mary’s College of California (2025). He also earned a master’s degree in history, teaching credentials, and an undergraduate degree in Business Management from De La Salle University, Manila. Additionally, he pursued graduate studies in Religious Education at the Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University. As Auxiliary Visitor, Brother Iñigo has been involved in supporting the Brothers in Myanmar, particularly in sustaining their presence and ministry.
NATTAPOLL CHAICHING Rajabhat University, Thailand
NATTAPOLL CHAICHING earned his BA with second-class honors and the Bhumibol Scholarship from Thammasat University, where he also completed his MA in political science. He obtained his Ph.D. from Chulalongkorn University with a dissertation, Thai Politics in Phibun’s Government under the U.S. World Order (1948-1957), which examined Cold War-era U.S.-Thai relations and the monarchy’s role in anti-communist strategies. His expanded book, Warlord, Royalist and the Eagle, gained traction during Thailand’s 2020 youth protests but faced censorship efforts, lawsuits, and state-backed attacks. He has published widely, contributes to Matichon newspaper, and has been a visiting researcher at institutions such as Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has also delivered major lectures, including the Pridi Banomyong and Jamlong Daoruang Lectures, on democracy and Thailand’s 1932 revolution.
KHOO YING HOOI, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Department of International and Strategic Studies, Universiti Malaya
KHOO YING HOOI, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of International and Strategic Studies at Universiti Malaya. Her research focuses on the intersectionality of power, human rights, democratisation, and civil society in Southeast Asia. Ying Hooi is the Editor-in-Chief of the Malaysian Journal of International Relations and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, the Journal of Southeast Asian Human Rights, the Indonesian Law Review, and Scientific Reports. Ying Hooi has received several fellowships, including the Mellon/ SAR Academic Freedom Fellowship, the ICNC Curriculum Fellowship, and visiting fellowships at Kyushu University, Mahidol University, and Humboldt University of Berlin. Beyond academia, Ying Hooi serves on the International Advisory Council appointed by the Timor-Leste government for Centro Nacional Chega!.
6 MARCH 2025 | 10:30 AM (GMT+8) | Henry Sy Hall Roofdeck, De La Salle University
"Confronting Coloniality, Enacting Decolonial Praxis: Autonomous Knowledge Production in the Global South"
FARISH NOOR, Ph.D. Professor of Political History, Faculty of Social Science, Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia
FARISH A. NOOR, Ph.D. is Professor of Political History at the Faculty of Social Science FOSS, Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia UIII. His work has focused mainly on the narratives and modalities of racialised colonial-capitalism in 19th-century Southeast Asia. His latest work is The Long Shadow of the 19th Century: Critical Essays on Colonial Orientalism in Southeast Asia (Matahari Books, 2023).
ROSA CORDILLERA A. CASTILLO, Ph.D. University of Bremen
ROSA CORDILLERA A. CASTILLO, Ph.D., is a public anthropologist and curator working on social justice issues through interdisciplinary research, teaching, and multi-media knowledge transfer and praxis. Straddling academic, artistic, and activist practices, her work spans critical areas of memory, imagination, media and politics, political emotions, solidarity, ethics, and decoloniality. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she explores the intersections of these fields, seeking innovative approaches to investigate, theorize, and address pressing social issues, with a particular focus on processes and dynamics of dehumanization and rehumanization that underlie violence, inequalities, and resistance. She is currently a substitute professor of public anthropology at the University of Bremen
JORGE VEGA Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin / Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
JORGE VEGA is a doctoral researcher in European Ethnology at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie (IfEE) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU) and a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. His research explores the intersections of environmental conflicts, extractivism, and colonial power in the Capitalocene. His engagement with social and environmental movements informs his work, which combines archival analysis with multimodal anthropology. Jorge has taught courses at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and HU on political ecology, philosophy and ethics of science, and decolonial thought. A published writer and educator, his interdisciplinary background spans literature, political philosophy, biological sciences, and environmental activism. In 2019, he co-founded the decolonial research group [decoco], merging art and research to critically explore decolonization and environmental crises.
NAYERA ABDELRAHMANSOLIMAN, Ph.D. Centre Marc Bloch / Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies
NAYERA SOLIMAN is currently a research associate at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin. She got her Ph.D. in political science from Freie Universitat Berlin in 2024. Her dissertation is about the haunting effects of the war-induced forced displacement in 1967 from the city of Suez, adopting a feminist oral history methodology and a history from home approach. She assisted in organizing the first History Workshops in Egypt. Her research interests and publications concern memory studies, social history, forced displacement, and education in Egypt.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Co2libri (2021-2025) is a Berlin University Alliance-funded initiative that assembles an interdisciplinary, transregional-oriented group of researchers and scholar-activists who work towards an inclusive intellectual agenda and collaborative knowledge productions. The Co2Libri 2025 Spring School is co-hosted by the UP Asian Center, the UP Center for International Studies, and the DLSU Southeast Asian Research Center (SEARCH).
For more details, you may reach us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 8891-8500 loc. 3586.
The Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman offers M.A. degrees in Asian Studies with four fields of specialization: Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and West Asia. The UP Asian Center also has an M.A. program in Philippine Studies that allows students to major in Philippine society and culture, Philippine foreign relations, or Philippine development studies. It also offers a Ph.D. program in Philippine Studies in conjunction with the College of Arts and Letters and the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy. For an overview of these graduate programs, click here. As an area studies institution, the Asian Center also publishes Asian Studies: Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia, the latest issue of which can be downloaded at the journal's website.
