The Pocket University is an intensive knowledge-building programme that fosters encounters between various different ideas and experiences, fostering the convergence of erudite learning and practice, by articulating contemporary culture, everyday and archaic experiences. And, in this encounter, it aims to help mobilise exchanges of knowledge, deepen renewed political perspectives and develop a prepared awareness before the complexity of the challenges posed by this new century.

Each year, during a 3-day period, the Pocket University proposes the creation of an ephemeral community of experience, observation, reflection and open discussion of current, local and global issues.

In each edition, participants will be able to meet Speakers: international thinkers and artists, relevant to our time, who will be invited to give a public lecture; Inhabitants: local residents who will describe a personal itinerary and knowledge linked to the dynamic of the city; and Observers: two guests who will accompany the entire programme in the field and who, on the last day of the event, will share their view of the proceedings, developed from a participatory, critical and purposeful perspective.

The first edition of the Pocket University will be held between May 27 and 29, 2022, in the Centro Cultural Vila Flor. The inaugural edition is dedicated to Cohabitation and new temporalities and will focus on the current situation of the rights of ethnic minorities in contemporary societies and the social, ethical and aesthetic elaboration of a cosmopolitan and transtemporal culture.

In the inaugural edition, the Speakers are: Françoise Vergès, French intellectual, writer and activist with a family origin in Reunion Island, who has developed critical thinking about the relationships between anti-capitalism, feminist activism and decolonisation; Vladimir Safatle, Brazilian philosopher, professor at the University of São Paulo and musician, who has produced reflections on the political construction of subjectivities, between philosophy, cultural criticism and psychoanalytic theory; Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, also known by her hip-hop name, Isis Tha Saviour, an American artivist based in Philadelphia, who works on the relationship between the institutional justice system (including reproductive justice), state violence and the African descent community in the United States of America.

The Inhabitants will be Svitlana Baptista and Niranjan Sapkota, who will share the experience of immigration to Portugal from the Ukraine and Nepal, respectively, in a specific space related to their personal history as a meeting place.

Svitlana Fedynyak Baptista will discuss the civic, techno-scientific and political culture in which she was educated in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the collective trauma of the ecological catastrophe of Chernobyl, the migratory experience between an authoritarian regime in Eastern Europe and a democracy in consolidation, in the far west of Europe, and her views on Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.

Niranjan Sapkota will discuss how he reconciles Hindu education and the cultural territory of reception, academic career and factory employment, in addition to his interest in the music of traditional instruments as a family practice – his parents are folk singers – to which he gives continuity. Both cases will help us understand issues of alterity, political inclusion and intercultural dynamics.

Finally, the Observers will be the French historian, Yvane Chapuis, head of the Research Department at the La Manufacture School of Arts, in Lausanne (Switzerland); and António Guerreiro, cultural critic and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, who will act as rapporteurs for this edition, analysing the quality of the exchanges that take place and their implications for a process of collective construction of knowledge.

The University, a century-old institution, is now involved in an unpredictable process of profound political, cultural and economic transformation, seeking new ways to rediscover its foundation – as a house of universal knowledge – and reinvent its ability to accompany social and economic processes and act productively in the world. In the first edition of the Pocket University, together, we aim to travel around the world in 3 days! This will be the first of many revolutions.

João Sousa Cardoso