Who: Susanne Börner

Title: Building emotional resilience through embodied and contemplative learning practices

When: Jan. 24, 2025
Where: David Turpin Building B323 and Online
Time: 11-12.30pm PST

Online Link: https://zoom.us/j/91432565796

What: Interconnected global challenges, such as increasing socio-economic disparities, the climate emergency, and the destruction of nature in areas with uncontrolled urban growth, significantly influence how young people make sense of their daily lives and imagine their future. Public policies and interventions continue to inadequately address the immediate and long-term wellbeing needs of marginalized youth. Particularly in the urban peripheries of the global South that suffer from both acute and chronic disaster risk, there is a need to rethink ways of creating environmental justice and developing emotional resilience for future-making.  

This also requires diverse participatory, creative, and contemplative forms of curriculum development on urban wellbeing that consider learning as a holistic, integrated, embodied, and experiential process. This contribution explores the lessons learned from a participatory photo-voice and a participatory body-territory mapping workshop for the creation of visual group narratives with 17 students from the University of Sao Paulo in the Eastern urban periphery of the city. The workshop enabled a reflection on multifaceted environmental injustices in environments marked by socio-environmental vulnerability while transforming students’ relations with self, fostering connectedness with others, as well as rethinking the relationships with everything around them.