Decolonial Gestures of Andean Bilingual College Students Promoting Quechua: Community-Based Participatory Research With Photovoice

• In Event: 34.038 - Challenging Post-Truth Rhetoric Through Decolonial Frameworks: Learning From Participatory, Ethnographic, and Narrative Research in Education

Abstract

Andean college students in Cusco, Peru, struggle to overcome discrimination against bilingualism during their pursuit of higher education. To examine this situation and possibilities for change, I employed a participatory method, photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1994) within a community-based participatory research framework, to facilitate Quechua-Spanish bilingual college students’ exploration of Quechuan practices in their university. Participatory research methodology promoted critical dialogues to challenge ideologies that have obstructed the revitalization, maintenance, development of the Quechua language in higher education. Although university policies in Cusco formally promote inclusion of indigenous knowledge and practices, bilingual Spanish-Quechua practices on campus have remained largely symbolic.
Andean college students and I collaborated for over six months using the photovoice methodology. Drawing from decolonial perspectives on language ideologies, I employed the concepts of chi’xi (decolonial gesture) presented by Rivera Cusicanqui (2017) and the analytics of decoloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2016) to analyze how bilingual Quechua-Spanish ideologies and practices are learned, unlearned, rejected, and enacted.
Photovoice participants contributed to community critical awareness of Quechua-Spanish bilingual ideologies in Cusco when presenting their visual metaphors during photo exhibitions. They continually face supay (coloniality forces) when enacting their Quechuan practices rooted in collective memories and knowledges, decolonial forces that call for social justice for Quechua peoples. Participants shared personal experiences as bilingual students facing barriers to maintaining their Quechua language, and then shared their proposals for encouraging their university create a fertile terrain for bilingualism, rooting out ideologies of deficits towards Quechua, and promoting T’ikarinanpaq, blossoming of Quechuan practices in college.
Already active in denouncing coloniality, participants adopted and adapted participatory photovoice methodology to expand recruitment of more bilingual students, locally and nationally, to their efforts to valorize Quechua in Peruvian universities, communities, and government.

Author

• Yuliana H Kenfield, The University of Texas at the Permian Basin