Radical higher education alternatives: lessons from socialist pasts and neoliberal presents

The present interview organized by the Greek researcher Natalia-Rozalia Avlona and the Brazilian researcher Felipe Ziotti Narita has been reworked and updated from its first publication in a special issue of Brazilian journal CIMEAC, devoted to the experiences of popular education in Latin America in the 2010s. Ivancheva was invited by the authors to discuss the contemporary higher education scenario and radical popular experiments in Latin America in light of her political and research experiences in Eastern and Western Europe. In the interview she touches upon her own trajectory as Eastern European academic and activist working on topics and geographies which remain siloed into different 'area studies' domains; in which scholars finding themselves – by birth or location – associated with specific peripheral area are only justified in their interest in their own region, whereas those located in the core hubs of knowledge production are in charge of comparisons made and lessons learned. Transcending the firm givens of such a core-periphery dynamics in academic knowledge – a key intention and message of the interview and Ivancheva's work – is crucial to overcoming this centrifugal dynamic, decolonializing universities and political practice and learning from the past. As the interview took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, few questions also touch upon Ivancheva's ongoing academic and activist work on precarious labour in academia and on some technologically enhanced capitalist developments in Europe and the Global South.