Trainers
María Cárdenas
Trainer for Power Dynamics in Peace Work
María Cárdenas is a German-Colombian. She worked in the Youth and Peacebuilding sectors in Colombia and Timor-Leste, and from Germany as a Project Manager, Backstopper, and Consultant for GIZ, UNDP, UNFPA, and AMBERO Consulting (now Dorsch Impact).
In her doctoral research, she inquired, through long-term research collaboration with Indigenous and Afrocolombian peace activists, about the decolonizing opportunities to build pluriversal peace in Colombia within the context of the 2016 peace agreement, identifying institutional, epistemic, and interpersonal barriers of coloniality that limit Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice.
Her teaching and training draws on Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of conscientization, emphasizing critical reflection, dialogue, and learner agency. She is passionate about finding ways to connect theory, positionality, and practice, and to diversify our expertise and practices for peace work.