From October to December 2019, FAC Research was delighted excited to host Sandra Tejada Mejía & Álvaro Ramírez March as residents.
Sandra is a Colombian social psychologist, a feminist and anti-racist activist. She holds a Degree in Psychology (Universidad de los Andes) and a Master Degree in Psychosocial Research and Intervention (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona). In Colombia, she worked with children and families living under social risk and vulnerable situations. Since 2015 she is based in Barcelona, where she has worked in community initiatives with other migrants that go through migratory grief, co-creating new empowering narratives that bond them to a new place. Currently she works as a therapist with racialized people, focusing on problems related to discrimination, racism and/or homophobia. As a social practitioner and a migrant activist, she is interested in community-based interventions that aim at fostering communities’ agency while being committed to an intersectional feminist perspective.
Álvaro is a social psychologist and an activist based in Barcelona. As a practitioner, he holds experience in community work working with groups intersected by multiple discriminations. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Social Psychology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona with a project on the solidarity social movements in the so called ‘refugee crisis’ – a topic he approaches from his own involvement in the anti-racist, migrant solidarity scene in Barcelona. This work explores multifaceted nature of solidarity in a context in which its meaning is continuosly contested. In his work, Álvaro is interested in drawing from collaborative methodologies and feminist epistemologies to craft situated forms of engaged social research and intervention. During his stay in Athens, Álvaro will be linked as a visiting student in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Political Sciences.
The project
During their residency, Sandra and Álvaro contributed to launching FAC Research in different ways that combine both their research and social intervention interests:
Social Cartography: a reflection on the migrant solidarity structures present in the city and the evolution of these groups in the last 4 years since the so-called ‘migrant crisis’. They payed special attention to the transnational connection of such groups and the symbolic and material infrastructures they rely on.
Workshop on Narrative Productions: an introductory workshop (involving 16 participants) on the methodology of narrative productions, based on the feminist epistemology of Donna Haraway. Narrative Productions consist in the co-creation of situated texts, and are used as both a method of intervention and a method of enquiry for academic research. The workshop consisted of 4 sessions starting (October 31-November 21, 2019). On Tuesday November 12 the residents hosted an Open Discussion: What Is Feminist Research? featuring leading practitioners of this methodology from the Fractalities in Critical Research Group, Marisela Montenegro, Beatriz San Román, and Núria Sadurní-Balcells.
