As part of the COST Action CA20105 “Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change”, one of the project’s main outputs has just been released: the creation of a higher education open access course on “Slow Resistance as Remembrance: Practices for a Fairer Future”.
“Slow Resistance as Remembrance: Practices for a Fairer Future” provides a conceptual and educational framework for exploring how acts of remembering can become forms of resistance. Grounded in the concept of Slow Memory, developed by an international team of scholars, this course examines how acts of remembrance — public or private, institutional or embodied — can serve as forms of slow resistance to injustice, degradation, exclusion, and erasure.
Organised around five key themes — Environment, Work, Care, Politics, and Conflict — the course invites higher education students and researchers to reflect on the temporal and political dimensions of resistance through carefully selected case studies. The materials can be used as a complete curriculum or adapted selectively, and are freely available to educators and learners seeking to engage critically with how different social actors have addressed the past to imagine more just futures.
Clara Sarmento, director of the Centre for Intercultural Studies (CEI) at ISCAP-P.Porto, contributed as author of the Environment module. Drawing on her research into symbolic forms of cultural production within vulnerable Portuguese communities, she developed educational materials structured around guiding questions, background and concepts, case studies, a thinking forward section, resources, and further reading.
Within the framework of COST Action CA20105 “Slow Memory”, Clara Sarmento also contributed to the virtual exhibition “Beyond Flowers: Tradition, Resistance, and Change” with a section dedicated to International Women’s Day in post-dictatorship Portugal. In July 2025, the Centre for Intercultural Studies (CEI) took part in the International Capstone Conference “Slow Memory and Beyond”, held at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, where it led a field visit-workshop on street art in Porto, based on the StreetArtCEI project. Further publications within the framework of the COST Action Slow Memory will be released soon.
📘 Access the materials here:
👉 https://www.slowmemory.eu/educational-material/slow-resistance-as-remembrance-practices-for-a-fairer-future/
More information about COST Action CA20105:
👉 https://www.slowmemory.eu/