DECOLONIAL – INSURGENT KNOWLEDGES OF THE "GLOBAL SOUTH" AND THE DECOLONIAL TURN AS A HORIZON FOR THE CRITICAL TRANSFORMATION OF CONTEMPORARY EDUCATION

Abstract

In a world profoundly marked by epistemic hierarchies inherited from the coloniality of power, education has historically been one of the main instruments for maintaining inequalities. That is, more than just transmitting content, the educational system, in many parts of the globe, has reproduced Eurocentric worldviews, silencing knowledge, practices and experiences from the peoples of the global South. In other words, the modern Western school, with its standardized curricula and its universalist logic, often operates as an apparatus for the erasure of epistemologies that are born of the body, territory, orality, and resistance. Thus, it is essential to observe that insurgent knowledge, forged in popular struggles, ancestral spiritualities, social movements and peripheral territories, emerge as powerful forces for the reexistence and reconfiguration of educational practice. Thus, this article has as its object of investigation the processes of epistemic insurgency carried out by subjects from the global South who, by challenging the monopoly of Western knowledge, build educational practices based on critical interculturality and epistemic disobedience. In order to analyze how these practices are articulated with the decolonial turn in education, we seek to understand to what extent they offer real horizons for the critical transformation of the contemporary school. In this context, the research is guided by the following starting question: how can the insurgent knowledges of the global South, articulated with the decolonial turn, contribute to the reconstruction of a critical, plural education committed to overcoming the colonial hierarchies of knowledge? For this, we used as theoretical repertoire the works of Antunes (2009; 2021), Althusser (1970), Bessa Freire (2011), Dussel (2000; 2009), Escobar (2014; 2018), Fanon (2008; 2022), Frigotto (2001; 2010), Freire (1968; 1971), hooks (2013; 2015), Laval (2019), Laval and Dardot (2016), Mignolo (2006; 2010; 2012), Quijano (1992; 2000; 2002; 2020), Santos (2013; 2017), Simpson (2017), Smith (2007),  Smith, Tuck and Yang (2019), Walsh (2013; 2019), among others. The research is qualitative (Minayo, 2007), descriptive and bibliographic (Gil, 2008) and with a comprehensive analytical bias (Weber, 1949). The findings indicate that insurgent knowledge has promoted ruptures with the monoculture of knowledge, repositioning the school as a territory of epistemic crossroads. Critical interculturality emerges as a tool for transformation, resignifying curricula, pedagogical practices and teacher training itself. Valuing the body, spirituality, orality and territory is essential for the reconstruction of fairer educational bonds. The decolonial turn, articulated with the reexistence of oppressed peoples, offers the basis for an ecology of knowledge that affirms epistemic pluralism. It can be seen, therefore, that decolonial education is not a complement to the current model, but an alternative project of the world.