The Southerness of Freire's Pedagogy

• In Event: From The Pedagogy of the Oppressed to the Struggles Against the Oppressors

Abstract

The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the classic work by Paulo Freire, encourages us to think and politically inscribe in the struggle for an education that is also a call to the struggle against oppression. To this end, Freire proposes a dialogic education, in which, in addition to listening to each other, students and educators can put themselves in each other's places in this process. As the notion of “relative” of the Kambeba indigenous people of Brazil, according to which a relative is one who feels with us and feels like us, and not for us, the Freirean dialogue presupposes this permanent shift towards an expanded and more effective listening to the other, when we manage to think with him, and like him, in the same line as Boaventura de Sousa Santos' proposal with the epistemologies of the South.
Thus, the struggle that Freire announced in his work, in which he denounced some of the mechanisms of oppression and dehumanization of the human being, remains alive today, but gains scenarios that transcend the peasant peoples of the Brazilian Northeast with whom Freire dialogued. This is possible because Freire, being in a micro universe of his region of origin, understood it and worked with it, in a logic that transcended that specificity and embraced, in that group, all the “ratters of the Earth”.
Following this logic, intertwining his thinking with others - sociological, political, philosophical and epistemological - we became able to perceive the relevance of recognizing the epistemological plurality of the world and the need to overcome the hierarchies between different knowledges, which support and legitimize social inequalities , so that the struggles of the oppressed – peoples and knowledges of the Global South, as Santos clarifies – move towards victories against oppression, its representatives and its economic, political and social mechanisms: capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.
Therefore, this intervention proposal focuses on the relationship between Freire's and Santos' thought, seeking to bring to the debate the voices that the oppressors sought to silence, but which, as we know, daily rise up, disobey the status quo , create actions and notions, establish dialogues and learn from each other, even – and perhaps above all – when no one teaches. Small daily and permanent insurrections swarm the planet, mutual learning and solidarities occur, almost invisibly (Certeau, 1994), as fireflies (Didi-Huberman) under the full moon, use in their way the rules that oppress them, escaping between the fingers of power established in the daily creation of others practices-knowledges, the recognition the other one as a legitimate other one (Maturana, 1999) in the permanent struggle against oppression and its representatives.
It is intended to highlight in the presentation some of these struggles: anti-capitalist; women, feminists and LGBTQIA+; anti-colonial and decolonial. In search of a fairer, more solidary world, based on prudent knowledge, for a decent life (Santos, 1995), for everyone.

Author

• Inês Barbosa de Oliveira, University Estácio de Sá