Knowledges From the South: Reflections on Writing Academically

• In Event: Inter-Epistemic Dialogues With Decolonial Thought and Praxis From Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

Knowledge and how we know is a crucial question both in our lives and teaching practice. Knowledge that tells us who we are (and aren't), the contexts and places to whom we belong and that feel like home, and those that don't but that we wander around in while foreign, the places that have been taken away from us. These are borders we know and inhabit, knowing, and experiencing the stories of violence and genocide of the place in which we work. We will explore some of these stories of erasure through institutionalized education that laws and the Chilean State have attempted to erase in the process of imagining itself as one nation. In this article we reflect on what becomes known and named through knowledge that we construct as researchers, academics and activists along with the knowledge that shapes our biographies

Historically, educational research has engaged with knowledge construction as coming from universities and moving towards society and/or education communities (authors, 2020). In a previous study, we argue that the publication requirements for academic journals, which are mostly in English, are a critical knot for the career advancement of education scholars in Chile. Researchers talked about how these requirements become obstacles in their desire to articulate their research with education communities and other social needs. Instead, their knowledge production is situated in liminal spaces of what is considered “fundable knowledge” (author, 2019). However, in this research in which we interviewed policy leaders and heads of research from Chile we concluded that even when they try to imagine a different way of constructing knowledge, it is still from a hierarchical logic of knowledge where research is brought down to society with a saviourist bent. For them, research is a solution to all problems (authors, forthcoming). In this paper we critique this idea of research as the necessary solution to all social problems and ponder who produces knowledge, how and where and for what purposes (Walsh, 2012).

This paper is structured first, describing a newspaper article we sent out in August of 2020, in the middle of chaotic discussion in the country on Mapuche violence in the Wallmapu. The text is an example of how we have been constructing knowledge with and outside of our academic spaces and show the way in which we think about knowledge, education, and violence. Second, we present the study that informs this essay, followed by an analysis of the work we have been doing on decolonizing our knowledge, the one we have been exposed to in our schooling and beyond that. Fourth, we explore the work of translation and translanguaging as we move across language barriers and geographic places in our work and everyday lives. Finally, we leave open reflections on what could be next in our work and some further questions about knowledge, research and what it means to transit with and towards decolonial, anticolonial, antiracist and feminist work.

Authors

• Ana Luisa Muñoz, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
  Presenting Author

• Andrea Lira, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• Elisa Loncon, Universidad de Santiago de Chile
  Presenting Author