Our motto is “insurgent and intercultural content” because we value diversity and we intend to be an instrument for the dissemination of knowledge emerging from the bottom up and from a wide range of angles. We aim to be a space for analysis, collective thinking and information exchange. We aim at providing contributions to amplify the voices of activists, scholars, professionals, communities and organizations that struggle against any sort of oppression and especially colonialism, capitalism and heteropatriarchy. We aim to raise awareness and fortify inter-knowledge and cooperation between insurgent forces, especially those of the Global and metaphorical South. Our content is consistent with critical and postcolonial approaches and we welcome spontaneous contributions that are willing and able to dialogue with this viewpoint. Our reference are the Epistemologies of the South, as elaborated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the research community he coordinates.
Alice News has a readership of over 30,000 people in more than 38 countries.
Type of content
We adopt copyleft using Creative Commons license. Our content is meant to be accessible to everyone, not only a specific community of scholars or experts. We aim to publish at least one new original content per week and one re-published content every day. The original content comes from our network of contacts or from self-proposed authors, it can be a text of approximately 1200 words or a short video of 3-5 minutes’ duration. The republished content comes from a range of different sites identifiable as alternative and independent media outlets, mostly adopting the copyleft philosophy. This type of content, we believe, shall strengthen the information stream coming from non-mainstream nor professional or corporate media outlets.
Our content is categorized under four different criteria that visitors can use to filter their search:
Languages
Alice News publishes content in English, Portuguese and Spanish. Generally, we do not translate contributions from one language to the other. Our language philosophy is based on the idea that our visitors can be able to read more than one of the working languages and therefore may want to have an outlook of our content without language restriction. Nonetheless, it is possible to filter the content using the search tool, by deselecting one or two languages, results will include only the language(s) selected.
Alice News architecture
Our website is optimized to be user-friendly and accessible from all devices, especially mobiles. Most of the website makes use of icons to avoid a language-based visualization, and the content is available in the three working languages. When language is needed for the virtual interaction with users (for instance in suggestion or search pages), the page is available in the three languages, and a language selector is visible on the top-right hand side.
We disseminate our content through the social network profile of the Alice research programme (linked to our homepage). Our video contents can be found under the Alice youtube channel playlist "Alice News
Alice News Newsletter organizes and displays the Alice content and send it in a resumed and well-ordered email received on a regular base.
Editorial Board
We are a small group of volunteers, scholars and professionals coming from a range of disciplines and geographical perspectives. We operate remotely as we are based in different locations but we consider the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra our home-place. CES has provided the original energy and support to this initiative and maintains its virtual infrastructure with the specific dedication of its IT Office (GTI).
Currently the Editorial Board includes: Boaventura Monjane (Mozambique), Célia Trindade Amorim (Brazil), Cristiano Gianolla (Italy – coordinator), Jessica Morris (Brazil), José Luis Exeni Rodríguez (Bolívia), Leonardo Almeida (Brazil), Rita Kacia Oliveira (USA/Portugal), Sofia José Santos (Portugal) and Withney Sabino (Mozambique).
Former Editorial Board members: Begoña Dorronsoro (Basque Country - Spanish State), Amit Singh (India, Associated Editor).
The Editoral Board is assisted by a number of Associates Editors from different world regions from where they scout for relevant contents and contacts. At the moment, there is one associate editor: Daniela Jorge Ayoub (Portugal).
For further information on becoming an Associate Editor please contact us: alicenews@ces.uc.pt
Short history
Alice News was originally created in 2012 (see original site here), within the research project “ALICE, Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons: Leading Europe to a new way of sharing the world experiences”. The Alice project was funded by the European Research Council and directed by Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos from July 1, 2011, to December 31, 2016, at CES. The first Alice News was created and edited by José Luis Exeni (Bolivia) and Maurício Hashizume (Brazil) with the support of Dhruv Pande (India).
With the end of the Alice project, Alice News remained partially inactive and for this reason, and in May 2018, a new team was created to revitalize the initiative launched on 26th September 2018.