May 31, 2024

After more than a year of preparations, we are proud to announce the public launch of the Untraceable University project! This project that has been shaped by input and feedback from a large number of people who have generously spent many hours in meetings, workshops, and discussions. We have been able to refine our aim and our approach:

The goal of the Untraceable University is to find out how we can build a culture that is socially and ecologically restorative, and which embraces radical change to our existing ways of living, learning, and working.

In pursuit of this goal, we are preparing to start building an alternative university town in 2029, where radically different systems can be tested out in real life and scaled to an urban size if successful. We are currently looking at rolling out this experiment in both South Africa and Colombia, and in preparation for this we are engaging in the research and planning that will be required for a project of this magnitude.

For this work, we are seeking radical, critical thinkers and doers from a wide variety of disciplines, who want to explore how their disciplines can be best applied and combined when used at scale and from the ground up. We are involving a large number of people to help design, critique, improve, and ultimately build this project. We are setting up a network of thematic groups that collaborate by rolling out different research as well as education & outreach activities. With our collaborators, we are making podcasts, writing primers, hosting workshops and webinars, publishing articles and developing course materials as a way to start exploring how we can jointly shape these ideas and prepare to take concrete steps to setting up this radical alternative university.

As outlined in our guiding principles, we believe in participatory design, a pluriversal approach, an in being context-specific (but not to a single context). This is a Global South-first collaboration, but we also invite like-minded people from other locations. And even though we start small and gradual, we want to aim for scale. Our newly designed website provides an introduction video and more information on how to get involved.

Since 2022, we have traveled to Colombia, Chile, South Africa, Zambia, The Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, and we have had online discussions with people from a large number of other countries and varied backgrounds. We would like to thank all the people that have engaged with us over this period, some of whom have gone out of their way to meet us during busy periods, layovers, or for a large number of meetings and discussions, and we look forward to formally announcing our initial partner network after the signing of Memorandums of Understandings has been concluded (expected by July 2024).