Tania Araujo is a feminist theologian and liberation philosopher from Brazil. She studied in Sao Paulo, Brazil, San Jose, Costa Rica and Linz, Austria. She is co-founder of the migrant self-organization group maiz (www.maiz.at), the Forum Interkulturaliät, of Migrawood, and the University of Ignorants.
As a cultural worker and socio-political activist she is working within self-organized contexts. The interrelationship of global issues and local experiences define the orientation of her work. Her recent practice is focuses on representation and participation by dissidence, irony, and subversion.
maiz is an independent organization of and for migrants with the goal to improve living and working conditions for migrants in Austria and to support their political and cultural participation, as well as to affect improvement within established and unjust social circumstances.
The course departs from the observation that “the dominant cultural/social groups enforce their supremacy (hegemony) not only by repressive state apparatuses, but in particular by establishing consensus in the field of discourse, meaning culture and education. They attain their supremacy not only by their economic, political and military influence but specifically by their power to define the production of knowledge.” (Encarnación Gutierrez)
How one intervenes in an activist-theorist manner in this production of a consensus – especially in the cultural field – is up for debate.