Conference Program

Critically interrogating the academic ecosystem while being part of it is neither a simple nor a self-evident undertaking. As Harney and Moten (2013) suggest, reflecting critically on the world of the universitas from the position one occupies within it may risk producing an excess of mannerism and a form of professionalization that operates primarily at the individual level, benefiting the single academic rather than communities. In this sense, the communities in question are those that are marginalized, Indigenous, subaltern, and all those forms of alterity that inhabit and experience the system.

The relationship between academia and the worlds of the undercommons/subaltern/oppressed/colonized (Bhabha, 1994; Freire, 1968; Harney and Moten, 2013; Spivak, 1988) can be interpreted through a dual mechanism: on the one hand, the appropriation and assimilation of the knowledge of those considered subaltern, to the advantage of dominant knowledge and the refinement of cultural colonialism; on the other hand, the devaluation of non-Western epistemologies. This process has allowed the university to legitimize itself as a hegemonic center of knowledge production, albeit at the cost of the systematic erasure of the original cultural matrices from which such knowledge emerges.

This contribution proposes to reflect on the dynamics of epistemic injustice that, still today, shape the ways of understanding and acting in the world (De Sousa Santos, 2014), attempting to circumvent the logics of extraction and/or devaluation of other forms of knowledge and recognizing their vital necessity in educational contexts. With the awareness that education and training may function as mechanisms for reproducing marginalizing social dynamics (Freire, 1968; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970; Illich, 1971), the paper seeks to advance a decolonial reflection on the logics through which institutional spaces too often become interpreters of monocultural visions, to the detriment of the contributions of the knowledge of alternative subjectivities (Spivak, 1988; Smith, 1999; Borghi, 2020; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984; Zakaria, 2022).

In this regard, the paper intends both to recover the perspectives and practices of popular education—particularly those connected to Latin American contexts (Gadotti, Torres, 1993; Puiggrós, 2016) —as spaces capable of valuing forms of knowledge, experiences, bodies, and subjectivities often rendered invisible by dominant narratives and institutions, and to engage with certain experiences of social movements for civil rights that embody an otherwise (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), often perceived as uncanny (Spivak, 1999) and frequently considered subaltern and minoritarian.