For an academy without privileges of power
The members of the CLACSO Working Group on Feminisms, Resistance and EmancipationWe express our rejection of the practices of harassment and sexual abuse within and beyond academia. Recent news involving social scientists such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Bruno Sena Martins is just one example of pre-existing practices and patriarchal, racialized, and hierarchical structures that allow highly regarded individuals, due to their academic output and intellectual influence, to exploit their privileged positions for personal gain.
personal and to abuse their power.
Our unwavering solidarity with the activists, students, and academics who have dared to break the silence and denounce the abuse of power and academic extractivism that have been occurring for decades in our places of study and work, affecting the careers, lives, and rights of many women who work there.
These acts have gone unpunished, among other reasons, due to the absence or deficient application of prevention and care policies, the normalization of institutional practices that systematically endorse the omission of warnings or complaints, and undoubtedly, the patriarchal pact that operates through networks of complicity, mainly among men, that make invisible the power relations and their consequences for the people involved.
We consider it urgent to place this problem at the center of our daily debates, to demand institutional actions, to convene university communities, professors, research staff, students and authorities to commit ourselves to denaturalizing harmful behaviors, to denormalizing the abusive exercise of power, and to contribute to creating safe academic spaces, free from sexism, classism, racism and violence.
For academic spaces free from patriarchal, racist, and neocolonial violence!
April 18th 2023
CLACSO Working Group
Feminisms, resistance and emancipation [+]
This text expresses the position of the aforementioned Workgroup and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.
