Situated knowledge and embodiment: reflections from the borders

• In Event: Negotiating embodied differences within Western academia. Experiences beyond the United States.

Abstract

This paper identifies structures that ‘discipline’ the individual within the Western university, and that shape what, and how, knowledge is legitimised. I provide an (auto) ethnographical account of my own trajectory as an Argentine/Latin American woman working with and within these academic structures in Australia – structures predicated on Western-centrism, ‘objectivity’, and gender and racial inequality. Australia itself provides an interesting point of discussion as a place of contradictory forces, and as the imaginary of Latino/a (or Latin American) identities has unique configurations and distortions in the antipodes. The paper is informed by decolonial thinking in its attempt to map out the links between colonial/imperial designs, and the Western university. The act of looking to the self is grounded on the convictions that knowledge is situated and politics are embodied. By charting out of my own geopolitical locus of enunciation I aim to de-link from the colonial matrix of power, and to articulate my experience as a migrant, ‘Latin American’, female academic in Australia.

Author

• Eugenia Demuro, Deakin University