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'Higher education and knowledge in Latin America past, present and future' series – webinar 4: Epistemic injustice, decolonisation and the potentials of intercultural education

CHAIR: Alma Maldonado, Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas (DIE)-CINVESTAV, Mexico
SPEAKER: Catherine Walsh, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador
DISCUSSANT: Regina Cortina, Columbia University, US

“The university is of the people, not the government,” was the leading cry of student protests in Ecuador a decade ago against the education policies of the then “progressive” state. “What people?” some asked, when higher education remains a primarily white-whitened enterprise with a clearly male ethos. With what and whose knowledges? And knowledges for what? Knowledge allied with the interests of capital and the project and logic of global coloniality? Or, as many in the region argue, knowledge of and for life?

While such questions are pertinent today in many regions of the globe, they are particularly so in Latin America where coloniality took form 530 years ago and continues its configurations, most especially in these times of pandemics in which COVID, systemic racism, gendered violence, and increased impoverishment, most especially for Black and Indigenous urban and rural communities, intertwine.

This talk takes root in this reality, asking not so much about the large-scale transformation of higher education in Latin America – a practically impossible task – but more crucially about the decolonial fissures and cracks present and emergent. The cracks, as I will argue here, are not the solution but the possibility; spaces where epistemic interculturalizations, decolonizations, and pluriversalizations can and do occur.

Jul 12, 2022 02:00 PM in London