Methods of Central American Epistemic Sovereignty

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 7:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Re/membering Beyond the Settler Colonial Academy: Methods Rooted in and for Ancestral Knowledges

Abstract

Objective:
In the discipline of higher education, there is a lack of recognition of Central American faculty underrepresentation that is related to the overall lack of epistemic investment in Central American knowledge production in the U.S. academy (Arias, 2007). Rather than replicate Central American invisibility in research, this study was designed as a project of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009) that examined how U.S. Central American faculty experience invisibility in the academy, and documented Central American methods of knowledge production.
Perspective & Methodology
The perspective I bring forth to this research is shaped by my identities and experiences as a U.S. Salvadoreña and a Central American researcher in the U.S. academy. I chose to embrace these identities that reject the academy’s settler-colonial practices of objectivity. Instead, this study and its methodology were constructed in ancestral alignment with Central American cultural histories and knowledge systems that inform its methods, including, research accompaniment (Tomlinson & Lipsitz, 2019; Abrego, 2022), Central American diasporic storytelling (Contreras, 2024), and Black and Indigenous Central American feminist practices of re/memory (Lopez Oro, 2021; Alma, 2024; Ramsey, 2024; Guzman, 2025) through artifact-based inquiries (Roswell, 2011). I employed these methods to co-construct knowledge with five U.S. Central American faculty participants in a research relationality of Central American kinship.
Results
This study resulted in an overall finding that Central American knowledge is systemically invisibilized through disciplinary borders that enforce scholarly hegemonies. Illustrating a praxis of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009), the faculty co-creators described three primary research methods that represent Central American epistemic sovereignty, which I describe below.
Counter-archiving: Collectively, the co-creators all practice archiving methods interpersonally and in their research methods. Each impacted by histories of imperial violence, they each examined archives to locate evidence that reveals both colonial and imperial gazes in visual artifacts, including maps and postcards.
Co-Construction of Knowledge by Central American Kinship: Each working directly with their ancestral communities, the co-creators shared commitments to communal processes of knowledge production. Their methodological practices produced Central American knowledge through intergenerational and culturally-based relationalities and shared ancestral knowledge.
Black Central American Caribbean consciousness: Four of the five participants identified as Black Central American Caribbeans, each carrying cultural epistemologies that framed their scholarship. Independently, each spoke about a sacred and ancestral Black consciousness tied to oral traditions, rituals, and to the Caribbean that was culturally passed down. Existing outside the bounds of colonialities and empires, the described Black Central American Caribbean consciousness engages in epiphenomenal time (Wright, 2015), where Black ancestry is a living one, and where the limitless possibilities of now are constructing Black hemispheric and diasporic futurities.

Significance

This is the first study that solely examines the experiences of Central American faculty in the U.S. academy, revealing systemic epistemic invisibility by disciplinary borders that foreground Central American knowledge production as struggles for epistemic sovereignty. In engaging in epistemic disobedience through research practices that infuse ancestral wisdom and cultural protocols, the co-creators’research praxis exemplify the potential for community reclamation and healing in conducting research with ancestral methodological alignment.

Author

• Eileen M. Galvez, Colorado State University