The BOCA project explores new forms of communicating academic knowledge as a way to strengthen the connection between the university and society. To do so, the project has two strategic vectors:

• The first, more analytical, aims at assessing different forms of communication and expression at play in academic spaces (for example, through collaboration with the Campus Speaks initiative of Humanities Across Borders).
• The second, more practical, aims at promoting actions to develop alternative forms of communication within the academic space, as well as between the academic space and wider society.

​​​​​​​These two vectors emphasize the importance of the situatedness of universities (in a specific time and place), as well as their potential to guide social transformations (at individual and collective levels).

BOCA combines research expertise in the humanities (arts, linguistics, literature) and social sciences (anthropology, sociology) to unsettle dominant practices of academic knowledge production and dissemination, such as linguistic nationalism, socially hierarchies, and those defined by disembodied and mostly written forms. We intervene in the University space to nurture other forms of communicating academic knowledge, and in so doing contribute to positive transformation of the university as a force for societal change across borders. 

In particular, BOCA conducts academic interventions that highlight more performative and experiential forms of knowledge. Taking a multilingual and embodied approach, the production and dissemination of knowledge (in both teaching and publication practices) could overcome dominant practices, and find new forms of academic communication and connection, within particular university settings and beyond.

• knowledge production
• knowledge transfer
• social transformations