What does education look like when daily life is shaped by conflict, displacement, and fragility? Can schools still be spaces of hope and imagination when safety, trust, and stability are constantly under threat?

Diana Rodríguez Gómez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores the intersection of education, violence, and state formation in Latin America, focusing on how schooling operates in fragile and conflict-affected regions. Through immersive ethnographic work in Colombia and beyond, she examines how teachers, students, and communities sustain learning amid war and political instability. Her scholarship challenges conventional ideas of education by revealing its moral, emotional, and deeply human dimensions in times of crisis.

In this episode, Diana and I discuss what it means to teach, learn, and hope in the shadow of armed conflict. She shares vivid stories from her fieldwork in eastern Colombia, where small decisions—like wearing a helmet on a motorcycle—can become matters of life and death. We explore how teachers and students negotiate danger with courage and creativity, transforming classrooms into fragile sanctuaries of meaning.

Our conversation moves from the ethics of fieldwork to the power of storytelling, from the limits of academic freedom to the emotional labor of teaching difficult truths. Diana reflects on how humility, vulnerability, and humor allow her to connect with students both in Colombia and in Wisconsin, where she now teaches courses on education across the Americas. Together, we examine how unlearning, imagination, and collective care might help us rethink what education can be in a world that is increasingly uncertain—and why the work of teaching remains, above all, an act of resistance and love.