‘Words beyond War’: Building an Academic-Refugee Community through Literature and Performance at the Jornada de Cooperació per la Justícia Global

Dr Cristina Pividori will contribute to the Jornada de Cooperació per la Justícia Global by presenting Words Beyond War, a FAS-funded initiative designed to
bond higher education with lived experience by cultivating ethical, participatory
dialogue on war memory and displacement.

The core objective of the Words Beyond War project was to create a shared space for students, staff, and refugees and asylum seekers living in Catalonia. In this space, participants could critically examine how war and trauma are represented in contemporary Anglophone literature and culture, while practising empathetic listening and collaborative knowledge-making. Our research groups G4RoC (Group for the Representation of Conflict) and POSTLIT (Beyond Postmemory Research Group) worked towards this aim through curricular integration and co-created activities, in close collaboration with KUDWA, a Barcelona-based, refugee-led association that empowers young migrants and refugees.

We enacted this objective through three public activities across spring 2025: a Storytelling Session (28 March) in which KUDWA facilitators led BA/MA/PhD students in reflective, hands-on activities on war narratives, migration, and displacement; a Role-Play Workshop (25 April) that staged asylum interviews, newsroom debates, and border encounters to test how power shapes “whose story counts”; and Singing Survival (12 June), a lectureperformance on Lynn Nottage’s Ruined that combined scholarly framing with live interpretation of songs from the play to examine gendered violence, testimony, and the afterlives of conflict. Together, these events enacted our premise that literature and performance are not merely objects of analysis but social tools for building communities and practicing justice-oriented pedagogy.

The results were transformative: students shifted from passive reception to dialogic engagement; refugee participants moved from being “case studies” to co-educators; and the classroom expanded into a community forum that modelled accountable, multilingual, and multimodal practices of witnessing. In short, the project achieved its goal: it strengthened an active collaboration between the academic and refugee community—materialised through our ongoing collaboration with KUDWA—and
demonstrated how university spaces can host reparative encounters that
transform how war is studied, remembered, and publicly addressed.