Conference Agenda

Times are changing in the least Dylanesque sense of the expression. For decades, our society has sedimented a culture of disconnection that cuts across today’s ecosocial and democratic crises, and which the university, rather than cushioning, sometimes ends up sharpening, consciously or unconsciously. Dominant university models prioritize training for the market, the fragmentation of knowledge, competition, and meritocracy, severing learning from lived experience, from territory, and from the power relations that structure inequality. Practices of university social engagement (such as volunteering, critical pedagogy, or service-learning), when designed without systemic analysis or a rights-based approach, become well-intentioned stopgaps, projects in which community collaboration may be epiphenomenal or merely adjectival, ultimately reinforcing paternalistic, individualistic, and depoliticized imaginaries (Mitchell, 2008; Mitchell and Latta, 2020). A teleological paradox is thus created, whereby well-directed effort becomes a mirroring vector that naturalizes poverty, exclusion, and unsustainability, while simultaneously limiting social impact and transformative educational potential.

Our proposal arises as a response to this scenario and is, consequently necessarily, a meta-project: a service-learning experience about service-learning itself. In collaboration with the NGO ONGawa, students from the degree on Modern Languages and Translation at the University of Alcalá will translate into English a collection of materials aimed at reconnecting the university and its surrounding community through horizontal relationships, symmetrical and dialogical initiatives, sustainable actions, and a discourse that flattens hierarchical structures and dismantles purely assistentialist frameworks.

Based on these translated resources, faculty members, students, and NGO participants will organize workshops with an initial local focus and, subsequently, an international scope, through which they will share this knowledge and these best practices to foster a genuine, deep, and transnational re-signification of the links between higher education and its environments. Our main goal is to generate a chain reaction that begins in the local community, extends to students, and from there reaches universities across Europe, ultimately returning to the community substratum.

In this sense, the project contributes to the redefinition of educational goals and curriculum design within higher education (track C). By actively involving students, faculty, and community partners in the co-creation, translation, and dissemination of knowledge, it promotes a participatory approach to syllabus development that integrates civic responsibility and democratic engagement as core components of academic training. Ultimately, the initiative seeks to position service-learning as a cross-cutting axis within degree programs, fostering a renewed understanding of training and collaboration that incorporates social commitment, symmetric interaction, and long-term community impact.