31/08/2026
From 24 to 28 August 2026, GloPhi welcomed scholars, practitioners and participants to Hildesheim for five intensive days devoted to “Healing as a Philosophical Practice.” The Summer School explored how different traditions understand and respond to vulnerability, suffering and rupture, and how philosophy can contribute to restoring relationships and communal forms of care.
The week opened with James Ogude’s sessions on Ubuntu. Beginning with his BBC interview on the concept, he presented Ubuntu as a means of reconstituting community before examining its relationship to human wellbeing. Iris Hunziker subsequently introduced her work on co-producing knowledge in clinical research into “Stimmigkeitserleben,” raising important questions about participation and the different forms of knowledge involved in researching experiences of healing.
Carolinne de Assis invited participants to understand the body as a “living territory” shaped by memory and ancestry. Her second session moved from reflection into an experiential practice of ritual care centered on herbs, water and gesture, in which the whole audience could actively participate through a shared ceremony. Rutte Andrade continued the exploration of Afro-Brazilian healing through the philosophical foundations of Samba de Roda and a reading of African cosmology. In a joint session, Rutte Andrade and Carolinne de Assis approached Samba de Roda as spirituality, practice and a philosophy of care. Prof. Abba Hailegebriel Girma then connected the crisis of meaning and the ontology of healing with psychology and social justice.
Thursday brought Indigenous healing knowledge and embodied practice to the center of the program. Pajé Tchydjo, a healer, medicine man, and spiritual leader from the Kariri Xocó tribe of Alagoas in Northeastern Brazil, opened the day with a conversation on Fulkaxo medicine. The traditional midwife Alexandra Caracol then brought indigenous knowledge of birth and intergenerational patterns into dialogue with pre- and perinatal psychology. An intensive ceremony session brought the group to a park at the cultural campus. Gathered around a fire, participants could directly experience a healing ritual by Pajé Tchydjo devoted to the breaking and burning of patterns, followed by song and dance.
On the final day, Lorena Grigoletto explored the ecopoetics of fairy tales and invited participants to practice fairy-tale archetypes as a form of healing through narrative. Maria Neuwirt’s session on imaginative rescripting in trauma therapy examined how memory can be revisited and rewritten through imagination. A collective feedback and take-away session brought the week to a close.
Across these sessions, healing emerged in many interconnected forms: as communal responsibility in Ubuntu; as a relationship with memory, ancestry and the body; as ritual, song, dance and gesture; as a response to crises of meaning and injustice; and as a narrative practice capable of opening new ways of relating to difficult experiences. Lectures and theoretical discussions were complemented by conversation, experiential exercises, storytelling, collective reflection and ceremony.
For GloPhi, the Summer School exemplified what it could mean to philosophize in a globalized world, not only theoretically and orally, but also through concrete enactment and embodied rituals. African, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous traditions entered into polylogue with clinical research, psychology, psychotherapy, literature and the arts. Oral, embodied, ritual and narrative practices were taken seriously as forms of philosophical knowledge while their ethical, political and epistemological implications remained open to critical discussion.
The Summer School was a successful and enriching event because it created space for this movement between theory and practice, academic research and lived knowledge, individual vulnerability and communal restoration. We extend our warmest thanks to all session leaders, participants and members of the organizing team for their openness, generosity and commitment to mutual learning. The questions, encounters and practices shared during this remarkable week will continue to resonate in GloPhi’s work and feed into future debates on possible synergies between philosophy and anthropology.
