Research in education, social movements, and coloniality: continuing a debate

Abstract

This is an essay based on an article published in Educação e Pesquisa, by Danilo Streck and Telmo Adams, titled Pesquisa em educação: os movimentos sociais e a reconstrução epistemológica num contexto de colonialidade [T.N.: Research in Education: Social Movements and Epistemological Reconstruction in a Context of Coloniality.] (2012). According to these authors, in order to be consistent, this epistemology has to deconstruct the coloniality that has marked us over centuries. In the present essay, we resume a few of the arguments of Streck and Adams, and step onto this ground of epistemological de-coloniality – very slowly. We argue that there is a paradoxical mixture in the proposals of participatory research, popular education, and decolonization movements: the mixture of the copy which we already are, the anthropophagy we did to what was imposed on us. The idea of copy and repetition is presented as though in the experience of an artificer: the action of making and remaking produces the artwork and, therefore, learning. The attempt here is to think of singular ways of seeking/producing/creating knowledge in the perspective of Latin American education.