Latin America/Caribbean is a continent marked by the coloniality of power, as affirmed by several Latin American thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Orlando Fals Borda, and which lives under a capitalism marked by dependency in the sense given to it by the Brazilian economist Ruy Mauro Marini, with the economies of the countries being organized within a logic of unequal transfer of values ​​to the central economies of capital.

For this reason, social logics of labor overexploitation are constructed in Latin America, legitimized by racist mechanisms targeting the ethnic origins of its populations (Indigenous and Black). As a counterpoint to this process, these populations subjected to these oppressive logics strengthen their experiences of alternative social interaction through cultural and communicative practices that redefine their territories.

Understanding these decolonial experiences requires decolonial epistemologies and methodologies of knowledge. Such experiences remain marginal in academia because they reproduce an "international division of intellectual labor" that establishes the construction of theoretical and epistemic paradigms as central to the core countries of capital, while these paradigms are merely applied in peripheral continents, such as Latin America.

Based on this context, the present working group proposes to discuss topics such as:

Experiences of Latin American social movements based on decolonial epistemological proposals and participatory methodologies;

Alternative socialities built from the potential of the popular classes in particular expressed through cultural practices and the reinterpretation of territories.

Theoretical and methodological proposals based on decolonial epistemologies from the perspective of alternative forms of sociability expressed in the experiences of the popular classes;

Resistance to racism, prejudice, sexism and xenophobia from the perspective of the potential to build alternative forms of sociability and changes in the oppressive social order.

Background

The proposed working group is the product of links established by the Center for Latin American Studies on Culture and Communication (CELACC) of the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), the Center for Education for Development of the Minuto de Dios University (Uniminuto) of Bogotá (Colombia), the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) Argentina headquarters, the Institute of Contemporary Social Studies of the Central University of Bogotá (Colombia), the Postgraduate Program in Urban Planning of the University of Vale do Paraíba (PLUR-Univap) of San José de los Campos (Brazil). This group of institutions began its articulation due to the international research project coordinated by CELACC-USP entitled “Social movements, culture, communication and territory in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires and Bogota”, financed by the Brazilian development agency FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) and carried out in the years 2016 to 2018.

The project's overall objective was "to contribute to the construction of a theory and methodology for analyzing new social movements in Latin America, based on the need to reconstruct the public sphere project, taking as its foundation the crisis of the traditional model built on the experience of liberalism and the particularities of the continent's nation-building, and highlighting elements that could offer possibilities for a reconceptualization of these social movements, considering the specificities of Latin America." For this reason, the methodological approach adopted was based on the studies of the Peruvian educator Oscar Jara Hollyday, entitled "Systematization of Experiences and Dialogue with Other Participatory Methodological Proposals," developed by thinkers such as Fals Borda and Paulo Freire, among others.

Based on this, the Brazil-Colombia colloquium on participatory methodologies was held in 2017 with the presentation of seven papers on the subject, four Brazilian and three Colombian. The results of this colloquium were published in a special edition of the CELACC/USP ExtraPrensa magazine.

The experience of carrying out the project enabled the articulation of researchers from different institutions who have been discussing these participatory methodological strategies, as a way of a unique realization and understanding of the experiences of social movements, and who point to the need for a deeper discussion by Latin American universities and intellectuals, as a convergence with the theories of decoloniality.

The experiences generated by the methodological procedures employed in the aforementioned project, such as the courses, seminars, and meetings held with social movements, revealed innovative possibilities for knowledge construction through dialogues of knowledge. Among the most significant results of this experience, we can highlight the need for a discussion of the concept of social movements, especially since it continues to be permeated by a Eurocentric perspective. This perspective is based on the existence of a public sphere to incorporate the diverse collective initiatives undertaken by subjects subjected to the brutal logics of oppression inherent in the coloniality of power. These initiatives point to the redefinition of territories, the reconstruction of communicative flows, and the reconstruction of cultural identities. At certain times, such initiatives fall within what Hohmi Bhabha and Stuart Hall call the "threshold time of minorities," when they analyze the practices of demanding diversity by discriminated groups. While these practices do not completely challenge the hegemonic power of globalization and capital, they also prevent the flow of power from becoming totalitarian. However, it is possible to expand upon such experiences through James Scott's concept of infrapolitics, which posits that all initiatives with a symbolic sense of contrast to the hegemonic order possess political significance; or through his concept of "hidden transcript." Scott considers this discourse to be composed of discursive and behavioral elements generally imperceptible to an outside observer, but which represent essential, everyday resistance strategies used by marginalized populations against processes of economic exploitation, structural violence, and sociopolitical deprivation imposed by the dominant elite. This "hidden transcript" is grounded in a popular culture ("folk culture") that defines and legitimizes various forms of resistance against the hegemonic culture of the elite and the chronic violence (of high or low intensity) perpetrated against marginalized groups by that culture (Scott 1985, 1989, 2013).

Based on these reflections, the activities carried out in 2016 and 2017 in São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá facilitated encounters between universities and social leaders from the periphery (understood here as all those involved in collective actions in peripheral territories) who, in defense of cultural identity values, redefine territories and construct alternative flows of communication and information. These issues were discussed in 2018 at the Symposium organized by CELACC.

For this reason, we understand that the construction of a space for theoretical reflection, based on decolonial thought, articulated with participatory methodological strategies, is the focus of the practices carried out by social movements in the peripheral territories of Latin America, which is why it is important to understand their political dynamics on the continent.

Theoretical foundation:

The thematic foundations of the GT Decolonial epistemologies, territorialities and culture It is grounded in the epistemology of decolonial theories developed by thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Orlando Fals Borda, and Paulo Freire; the Marxist theory of economic dependency proposed by Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio dos Santos, and Vania Bambirra; and the participatory methodologies of social movements. The main vectors of this Working Group's discussions are the reconfiguration of territories based on the practices carried out by movements in these localities, the construction of their own communication flows (particularly through the appropriation of information and communication technologies), cultural resignifications arising from the confrontation of cultural and historical traditions with realities imposed by power mechanisms, and all of this seen as forms of resistance to the colonial mechanisms of power.

Thus, the idea of ​​decoloniality that the Working Group intends to discuss is not merely a theoretical conceptualization constructed from academic reflection; rather, it is the product of a systematization of experiences and practices carried out by individuals in peripheral territories. Therefore, it is pertinent to establish an interconnection between the concept of decoloniality and that of participatory strategies, so that discussions are built upon encounters and dialogues of knowledge between the university and social movements, within an epistemic perspective akin to Paulo Freire's proposal in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

From this perspective, we seek to relativize established knowledge and commit to research that transforms the conditions under which coloniality (power, knowledge, and being), patriarchy, and various systems of oppression are reproduced. To this end, we are interested in understanding Latin American realities and their political processes from the periphery, considering not only the geopolitical production of knowledge but also urban peripheralization and the "rural" and peri-urban sectors of our Latin American countries. This is achieved through comparative analyses that allow us to understand similar processes, discontinuities, transformations, and continuities.

To this end, the proposal of this group is to bring together researchers, “peripheral” intellectuals who develop studies and approaches from collaborative and delocalized research methods of the “positivist” logic from which common senses and transdisciplinary knowledge are built that aim to strengthen decolonized epistemologies.