Viveiros de Castro and Oswald de Andrade know Marx and Freud, the ethnographic and blind discourses of “the savage” created in the XIX Century, and the critical paradigms that have shaped the anthropology and the production of cultural artifacts in the West, and by extension, in Latin America. I want to highlight the time distance […]
Re-learning How to Learn, and American Problem?
First Idea: In the introduction to The New Education we read “In the last decade, it has become fashionable to say higher education would be more efficient and modern if were run as a business, treating students as “customers.” (pos. 230). The author accurately presents some of the historical roots of the “buisinefication” of higher […]
The Question of Present(E) Form
“Presente”, to be present, in the present, a wrinkle that merges time and space together, to be present, a call for embodiment and attention to our surroundings, an interpellation of the environment …. shouting to us: “stop… and listen”. Reading Diana Taylor’s text “Presente” is especially relevant in the progression of our class, the text […]
Sketch of a Pedagogical Eating-lecture
We set our pedagogical project on, at, with, and under the table. We see the table as a setting that, drawing on Paulo Freire, scripts relationality—and for Freire, a radical pedagogical project begins with dialogical relations. However, the table was not our initial point of departure; rather, we arrived at it through hours of dialoguing, […]
Writing Papers, An “Epistemicide”?
My working group for this class has been reflecting on different ideas and doings dealing with constructive ways to think “epistemologies” and “alternative pedagogies”. In those discussions the paradox of bringing forward the limitations of western academic while being imbedded in the system of an American private university, was central. We kept thinking, what’s the […]
Mascaras y Traducción: Trayectorias de la Hegemonía en Rivera Cusicanqui y Mbembe
Había leído hace un tiempo el gran ensayo de Achille Mbembe donde se acuña el tan necesario concepto de “Necropolítica”. Sin embargo, leerlo de nuevo a la luz del “Principio de Potosí” de Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui fue revelador; la forma y el lenguaje del texto de la última no se parecía en nada a la […]
Protocols of Translation: Re-thinking the Languages of the “Oppressed”
“…So we learnt the music of our languages on top of the content” writes Ngugi wa Thiong’o about the oral heritage and the importance of storytelling in Kenya. I perceived the echo of this voice, that craves moments of creative co-operation, in the frustrations of young Freire trying to grasp the shortsighted methodologies of still […]